226 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



$1,800 worth of apples. He sold a bushel of Williams apples 

 for ten dollars — 109 apples. His Porter apples he got five dol- 

 lars a bushel for ; and for the Gravenstein and Hubbardston 

 Nonesuch he got astonishing prices. Mr. Dodge is correct. 

 Perseverance will save your fruit. There is the evidence of it. 

 People came from all the villages round and said : " Well, 

 Captain Pierce, you have got more apples on your three acres 

 than we have got in our whole town." They were astonished. 

 His neighbor had trees that blossomed, and the fruit apparently 

 set, but the apples dropped off, and he did not have a barrel on 

 the whole of his ground. Nothing of that sort occurred with 

 Captain Pierce's trees. In addition to his apples, he raised 

 twenty bushels of Bartletts and about twenty tons of marrow 

 squashes on his three and a half acres. . 



Professor Chadbourne. It is said that one gentleman had 

 his young fruit set well, but after a time, they all dropped off. 

 That was very generally the case in our part of the State. I 

 never saw apple trees blossom so well, I think, as they did this 

 year. The fruit set and grew to the* size of grapes, — some 

 large and some small grapes, — and then the great mass of it 

 fell off, so that you might say, we had no crop at all. I tried to 

 ascertain the reason of this, and I found that certain trees back 

 of my house, that are in comparatively damp, rich soil (you 

 may say, the trees that are well taken care of,) retained their 

 fruit ; and they gave me all the fruit I had this fail, which was 

 very little. All the trees on dry land lost their fruit. I have 

 been disposed to attribute it to this fact. Everybody who 

 knows anything about the habits of trees knows that after they 

 have put out their leaves, made their wood, and set their fruit, 

 they not only set buds for the next year, but they store up in 

 their tissues the nutriment for the next year's growth ; and I 

 have been disposed to think that in the seasons of drought we 

 have had, these trees were unable to gather up nutriment for 

 the next year, and after the buds set, this great crop of fruit 

 made such drafts upon the tree that there was not nutriment 

 enough to support them, and they fell off. And I infer so from 

 the fact, that those trees in damp soil in my garden, where they 

 could store up nutriment, gave me good crops. I have mado 

 inquiries of Mr. Letherbee in regard to this matter, and find 

 that his observation is the same. I mention these facts to see 



