No. 7. ■ DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE :m 



that if you have apple trees far enough apart you will have great, 

 large, thrifty, low-topped trees, full all around and up over and 

 through the whole tree, making three or four acres of apples on one 

 acre of ground. I would rather have ten trees with sufficient room 

 than thirty crowded together. My orchard being planted too close 

 did all right for a number of years until the trees grew large and to- 

 gether, so that with all my thinning out and cutting out my trees 

 were injured. The lower limbs could not bear and died, and I had 

 but one acre of apples on an acre of ground, and then all on the tops 

 of the trees, and hard to get at, as we could hardly get our ladders 

 around and between the trees, and so high up it was both slow and 

 dangerous work to pick the apples. I am not the only person that 

 made this mistake. We plant peach trees between the apple trees 

 and also an extra row of peach trees between the apple row, making 

 three peach for one apple, excepting the outside rows; the peach 

 will be ready to take out before they will injure the apple trees. 

 Varieties to plant, where and how to plant, are the two essentials 

 in growing apples. 



PICKING APPLES FROM THE TREES. 



In this we have long since dropped the old fashioned way, with 

 bag on your shoulder, which was both hard on the man and apples. 

 We used baskets made for the purpose for some time, when we 

 found that tin buckets made for the purpose holding a half bushel 

 was the most convenient, and much better for the apples. In pick- 

 ing apples in this way you need not bruise them at all. Picking 

 apples is not as much in the moon as in the handling of the fruit, 

 notwithstanding the old time notion. Take your bucket, hook and 

 a long, light, linn wood ladder, and line, and go right around the 

 tree from bottom to top, then up the tree, through the centre, to 

 get what you could not reach from the ladder, having some little 

 chap to empty the bucket as let down by the line from the ladder or 

 tree. Some years ago, I used two buckets so I did not need to wait, 

 and I picked one day seventy-five bushels of Northern Spy, and the 

 next eighty-eight bushels of Baldwins. I worked fast and hard, had 

 full, nice, low-topped trees to work on, and I did my work well, 

 cleaning the trees nicely, and handled my apples right. Sometimes, 

 w'hen the apples are real good we empty the buckets from the tree 

 right into the barrels and take to the house without assorting them; 

 most generally we empty on piles under the trees and sort them and 

 put in barrels to take to the house. We think the open, sweet po- 

 tato barrel, when we can get them, are the best to keep apples in. 



HOUSE FOR APPLES. 



Some ten years ago I built an apple house that will hold five hun 

 dr*»d barrels of apple three tierp high. The building is twenty by 



