18 The Bulletin. 



Laundry Soap and Water.— in a limited way we have used ordinary 

 laundry soap as a remedy for San Jose Scale. The soap which we used 

 was ^'Octagon." We used it at the rate of one pound of soap to one gal- 

 lon of water, as follows: The soap was shaved into thin slices and put 

 in the proper amount of water and placed over fire. "When boiling hot, 

 stir thoroughly to dissolve the soap. Add enough water to make up for 

 evaporation. It is then ready to apply. The extreme simplicity of this 

 remedy makes it an easy one for persons in cities or towns with only 

 a very few trees in the back yard or garden. But this remedy should 

 only be applied in winter, for at that strength it would almost certainly 

 hurt leaves or fruit. 



WHEN TO GIVE THE TREATMENT. 



Winter Treatment Best. — As already stated the best one time to 

 spray for San Jose Scale is late winter (February or early March) 

 before the buds have opened. The later in the winter the better, just so 

 the treatment is completed before the buds open. 



Summer Spraying for Scale. — Sometimes we discover the San Jose 

 Scale on our trees in spring or summer, when the strong winter appli- 

 cations can not be safely made. In this case trees that are only mod- 

 erately infested will usually live safely until the proper time for treat- 

 ing them in winter. But trees which are badly infested, already weak- 

 ened or partly dead, may need some immediate treatment. In such 

 cases one may use the regular winter applications, taking care to apply 

 them only on the larger branches, trunks, etc., and not permit it to touch 

 leaves or fruit. But we consider that for such summer treatment it is 

 best to use the self-boiled lime-sulphur wash, which is discussed later in 

 this Bulletin (p. 31). This wash, which is perfectly safe as a sum- 

 mer treatment even on leaves and fruit, is fairly effective against the 

 scale, so that one (or at most two) summer treatments with it will carry 

 the worst trees over until the regular winter spraying is given. 



Fall Spraying for Scale. — Although the weight of opinion is in favor 

 of late winter as the one best time to spray for scale, yet a few people 

 prefer fall spraying, and some even spray both in fall and late winter, 

 though we do not think this is necessary as a regular practice. Fall 

 spraying is done after all fruit has been gathered, when the leaves have 

 begun to drop, or soon after they have dropped. For fall spraying we 

 believe there are special advantages in using the soluble oils, as they will 

 penetrate more of the small crevices and reach a larger percentage of 

 the small young scales which pass the winter. On the other hand the 

 lime-sulphur solutions leave a coating on the branches so that when they 

 are applied in late winter this coating acts as a considerable protection 

 to the trees during spring and early summer. So, if one wants to come 

 as near as possible to exterminating the scale — we believe that the best 

 plan would be to use soluble oil in fall and lime-sulphur in late winter. 

 But we want to emphasize the fact that the insects are so small that 

 absolute extermination is impracticable (if not absolutely impossible), 

 and even at the best we must expect, and plan,, to treat infested trees 

 once each year. 



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