1883.] EEPORT ON POMOLOGY. 317 



As an instance to illustrate this point, let me cite a fact. Some 

 forty-two years since a father in West Stafford, Conn., said to his 

 five sons, " there is a sand waste of five acres. If you boys will 

 plant that to white pine and take care of it you may have it; " the 

 land at that time was as near worthless as land could be. Well 

 those boys did plant it in rows some seven feet apart by eight feet 

 in the row, and now that five acres has risen in value from nearly 

 nothing to $80 per acre, or four hundred dollars for the tract. 

 And those boys, Daniel, Alden, Spencer, David, and Noah Davis, 

 look upon that pine-timber as of some value. We learn that the 

 Shaker Communities of Enfield have treated some hundreds of 

 acres in the same way, more recently. 



Elder Pease of the North family of Shakers at Enfield, fully 

 appreciates the importance of turning our waste land to good 

 account, and has done as follows: he has taken 200 acres of their 

 sandy plain, and year by year made sowings of seed of white 

 pine, until he has a splendid young plantation of area aforesaid, 

 stocky and vigorous, which will gratify his sight as long as he 

 lives and be a monument to his memory when he is gone. 



Elder Pease states that he has found the best way to be merely 

 to sow the seed on the turf, and without greater pains a good 

 catch will be the result; he says that it will invariably get a good 

 start and do well when thus planted, no matter how hard the soil; 

 the seed does best when sowed in early spring; as to gathering 

 the seed, he says the squirrels gnaw off the cones in September, 

 for their food in winter; he goes to the pine forest and gets those 

 cones by the load, spreads them on some spare floor to lie till they 

 open, and the seeds, by raking over the cones repeatedly, come 

 out and may be swept up and put in bags for spring use. 



It is not every year that the pines seed well, but when they do, 

 the matter of saving and sowing the seed is easy and simple ; in a 

 goo4 fruiting year the cones will be found under the pines quite 

 thick, and it might be quite a pleasure to the young people to go 

 on a coning excursion, and by an after-planting help to restore 

 health and beauty to the old "Nutmeg State." 



Mr. Daniel Davis, above mentioned, has recently bought a tract 

 of some fifty acres in Tolland of "Shrub Oak," at $2.50 per acre, 

 and after burning over, plants to timber, I think White Ash. The 

 assessors have doubled the land in the list, but Mr. D. may soon 

 exempt for ten years entirely, after which the plantation may be 



