482 I ANNUAL. REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



pay for the picking and yet the soil is naturally so poor you can't 

 raise a disturbance unless you plant a saloon there. Some of the 

 larc,(^ orcliardists 'out in the A\'e!?t have several hundred, some a 

 thousand, and some five thousand acres, but they can't care for 

 them properly. I believe that the man who has no more than he can 

 care for properly will grow the best apples. Very few of them have 

 more than forty acres, and I believe very few depend on hired 

 labor altogether, but use the labor they have in their own family. 

 They gfow better fruit, simply because they can do the w^ork on 

 time. We had a fine bloom on the trees last spring, the weather 

 was good and we began to spray. Suddenly the weather changed 

 and we had to quit. Some varieties that bloomed sooner were all 

 right. We had some good apples, but the apples that bloomed late 

 had the apple scab. We cleaned up the crop but most of them were 

 scabby, and all inferior, some of it due to drouth, so that I believe 

 the man who has the small acreage will make the best success. 

 There are lots of places in this country as well as that, that could 

 be profitably put to fruit. There are lots of places that the soil gets 

 washed away and if that was put to fruit under the soil-mulch 

 method, instead of wheat, I believe in a few years they could make 

 a good fortune out of it, if they care for it properly. You cannot 

 do it in growing wheat or grain of any kind. Because we are on 

 those hills, which we cannot cultivate, we had to do something else. 

 We would work the soil and a big rain was very likely to wash the 

 BoiJ away with it. It took all the fertility out of the soil and we 

 eould not replace it without great cost. We saw that we had to 

 keep the land in grass. We mow the grass and leave it on the 

 ground and haul out manure and straw and any other coarse ma- 

 terial we can get. Look at the forest. You find the water going 

 from it perfectly clear. It is not taking the fertility and the soil out 

 with it. They stay right there. The leaves form a mulch and that 

 forms fertility when it decays. That is what the forest needs and 

 what we want for fruit trees. I believe that fruit trees as well as 

 forest trees take up great quantities of water. I found some fig- 

 ures the other day, telling how much water a tree will take from the 

 ground. Some one made a test and it was found that a tree took 

 up 2,50 gallons of water per day. First, it has to produce the leaves 

 and then the apples. Of course, water is going out through each 

 one of those leaves every day, so you see it takes an enormous 

 amount of water and you must keep that water in the soil in the 

 form of soil moisture, and we find our mulch helps do that for us. 

 I don't believe we need the amount of fertility in the soil that you 

 nlieed for a grain crop and I don't believe apple trees will pay as 

 well for a feeding of plant food in the form of commercial fertili- 

 zer as wheat, grass, corn and other things of that kind. On the 

 other hand, they do not require as much water as the fruit trees 

 do. At one time the entire surface of the earth was barren. After 

 a time, a few forms of plant life began to grow. This in turn de- 

 cayed, and the land became better as years went by, till we had 

 quite a good lot of vegetation on the earth. That land got better 

 year by year simply because there was plenty of humus in the soil. 

 I don't see why the land should not pi^ot better year after year, 

 but in many cases it is getting poorer every year, because the peo- 

 ple are taking out everything there is in it. You cannot have a 



