No. 6. dp::partmbnt of agriculture. 439 



mark the limbs that are to come off myself. I fasten a small paint 

 brush on a pole, I then take a bucket of Venetian red and touch up 

 the branches that I think ought to come off. The men are instructed 

 to saw them off' clean and smooth. I had a man working for me 

 who thought he know how to trim. He said, *'I can trim your 

 orchard. I know how to trim." When I got out he was at the 

 second tree. He was taking off' all the lower tier of limbs. I 

 stopped him right there and those two trees have not got over it 

 yet. They don't bear half as much as others of the same age. 



We aim to trim every other year and we have barefoot boys 

 run through every year and take out water sprouts, they grasp them 

 firmly and give them a little twist, which brings them out, root and 

 all, including adventitious buds and by October thay are pretty 

 nearly all healed up. 



We aim at clean cultivation. We do not always get it. If 

 weeds get too large for our harrows we use the Oliver chilled plow 

 a second time and turn them under — better late than never. We 

 are not afraid of late cultivation in berries or tree fruits. By slack 

 cultivation you induce a weak little growtli, ripened too early which 

 the frost may kill. We never had a branch of apples or cherry or 

 peach killed by winter freezing. 



We use commercial fertilizers and we think we get results. 

 We fertilize and trim each tree individually. Some trees don't get 

 more than a pint of potash, while others get three or four quarts. 

 You can know pretty near by the bud development. It is a little 

 like a physician prescribing for a patient, we can attend to it pretty 

 quickly, but do not stop to explain why. It would occupy too much 

 time. We grow peach between the apple trees in part of our or- 

 chard and pears, raspberries, strawberries, etc., in the balance. 



With cover crop, we have had some experience and crimson 

 clover we have found to be the best thing that we can use, but I 

 don't think that we wall try it again except for every alternate year. 

 Our orchards bear on alternate years mainly and after we drove 

 over it six or eight times to spray and again to haul the apples off 

 there wasn't much clover left. 



Thinning, we try to do systematically, but it is never done as 

 we would like to have it done. We take off ALL the inperfect 

 fruit. Some pickers have been working for us seventeen years, but 

 even then they leave too many apples. We want all the imperfect 

 apples taken off, and if the tree is heavily laden we want some of 

 the perfect fruit taken off also. Get the apples thinned so the tree 

 will stand the load of fruit, and then take a few more off. There 

 is no use in growing knotty apples. We turn them into cider. We 

 find that we get better results by using women and boys from school, 

 in thinning the apples, than from men, for they will take them off as 

 instructed. We do not claim to have the apples only four or six 

 inches apart. A small pendant branch may have apples touching 

 and mature them. We believe in cleaning out all the defective ap- 

 ples. We have pickers to pick the apples after the fruit is matured. 

 We kept account of cost of thinning and after harvesting the crop 

 we found it only added five cents a bushel to the cost of picked ap- 

 ples. When we came to pick the apples this year we were disap- 



