440 ANNUAL. REPORT OP THE Off. Doc. 



pointed. We like to have quite a lot of bushel crates. We had or- 

 dered goods from New York State, but did not get them until after 

 the picking was over. This year we tried picking by the bushel. 

 One man picked 115 bushels a day, and I think we got just as careful 

 work then as when we paid by the hour. Three cents a bushel made 

 pretty good wages. There is a mistake a good many of us are in- 

 clined to make. When we see a man making pretty good wages we 

 think we ought to cut down the rate. If we have crates enough to 

 put the apples right iuto the crates and don't let them stand in the 

 sun. We put some of our apples in Pierce-Williams apple boxes. It 

 was work that was new to all our men, and I suppose that in open- 

 ing the boxes we will find them in not quite the order we wanted 

 them to be. Lancaster county is as near the home of the York Im- 

 perial as Adams. York county is their home, but we have adopted 

 them, and our pack is York Imperial. 



In regard to sorting and selling. I depend on what the men 

 who buy want. If they want to buy them as they run, we sell them 

 that way. If they want them graded, we sort them to suit, but we 

 won't condemn a York Imperial like these on this plate, or one half 

 that big. It don't pay to send fine small apples to the cider press. 

 There is a certain trade that uses small apples. A great many peo- 

 ple want to put little apples in the dinner basket. In our retail 

 trade a great many will buj^ something pretty for the table or side 

 board. One woman wanted to buy some nice little apples of a bright 

 color to put on her table. She said she used them every week in- 

 stead of flowers, as they didn't make so much dirt, and it was a 

 change for the table. When they were done she could give them 

 to some of the neighbor's children. 



We grow a whole lot of things in the orchard. Perhaps we 

 have been cropping our orchards too heavily, perhaps we have been 

 fertilizing too strongly, but we hare always put on more than we 

 thought we were taking off. I was compelled to do something after 

 planting my first orchard which gave me the name of being a mean 

 man. Gunners destroyed our trees by shooting into them, and I 

 put up trespass notices. I believe we ought to keep the trespassers 

 off altogether. I don't want anything in the orchard not necessary. 

 I don't want a loose horse, cow or anything else in the orchard. 

 They will ruin our trees. The trees aredown to the ground and 

 the cows will take off two-thirds of our crop. We don't want hogs 

 in our orchard, they too will ruin the low branches. We. have no 

 use for chickens in our orchard. We gather up all our early wind- 

 falls for cider, and we don't want a lot of chickens to muss things 

 up. There is another point in caring for the orchard. We remove 

 all rubbish about three feet from each tree before the ground Treezes 

 in November, and we don't want chickens to scratch it back. . We 

 want every tree to grow and every tree to continue growing and 

 fruiting. Ten, twenty or thirty per cent, of the trees missing re- 

 duces the crop and may cause a loss instead of a profit. Then in 

 addition to selling the apples in bulk, boxes and barrels, we sold 

 some apples to the cannery that were of a different grade. Then we 

 worked up a lot into apple butter. These different grades amount- 

 ed to a great deal. Apple butter is worth about fifty cents a crock, 

 and we had about 800 crocks. We can get help in this work for 



