No. 6. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 437 



"Never mind what your wife says, but just tell us what you saw 

 and know. Some fine morning if your wife should come in and 

 say the heavens have fallen, what would you think?" "Well. I 

 should think they wus down." The fruit growers don't believe all 

 the editors say now, nor what some peojple tell them, even if they 

 are scientific men. Every fruit grower ought to be a careful ob- 

 server. He ought to be interested in his work and work out every 

 problem as if it had never been worked out before. 



Cherry orcharding and pear orcharding have been covered by 

 previous speakers, and I suppose you people want me to talk more 

 particularly about apples. I believe that you will pardon me for 

 telling just another little story here to emphasize my belief in prov- 

 ing things. I think this question was propounded by a Greek 

 philosopher. ''If you take a basin of water and weigh it and put a 

 fish in it, why don't that fish increase the weight of the water?" 

 Some said it was owing to the air bladder in the fish, others had 

 other theories. One old fellow of an inquiring turn of .mind, took 

 his basin of water and weighed it and then put the fish into it and 

 found that it increased just the weight of the fish. We must prove 

 things for ourselves. 



In regard to selecting a site for an orchard, I would select 

 a location where there is good air drainage and to be sure whether 

 there is good air drainage, I would want to watch for it at least a 

 jear, especially on foggy mornings, to see if there were any pockets 

 where fog collects. I would rather have poor water drainage, nat- 

 urally, than poor air drainage, because the watet drainage you can 

 control artificially, but the air drainage no man can control. Have 

 the site near the railroad to save hauling apples and fertilizer. I 

 don't want a big orchard far from the railroad, because of the ex- 

 pense of hauling. Ten cents a barrel for tiie hauling adds considera- 

 ble to the cost of the apples and twenty-five cents a barrel which 

 some have to pay makes more difference and that is an item that 

 helps to change the balance in the ledger. 



Then in regard to the soil; I would select, I believe, not the 

 ground that will produce 100 bushels shelled corn to the acre, for 

 ground that will produce that much grain will produce a like growth 

 of wood with large cells that fall an easy prey to blight and other 

 diseases. In our country, we grow a great deal of tobacco. There 

 are farms that have raised |300.00 worth of tobacco per acre, and 

 I know of one case where tobacco has been grown twenty years 

 successively without any change, and land of that kind you hardly 

 want to put into fruit; but there is ground that don't produce a first 

 class tobacco crop, but will produce a first class fruit crop, and it 

 is surer than the heavy ground that will produce the large tobacco 

 crops. 



In selecting trees, get those with a good, healthy independent 

 root system. 



On one occasion we made root grafts, using roots cut up by the 

 plow in plowing an old orchard. These pieces of roots were cut 

 to, perhaps, three inches and a scion six or eight inches long was 

 inserted into the piece of root, and the whole planted so that only 

 one or two buds were out of the ground. That bit of root kept the 



