FORTY-FIRST ANNUAL REPORT. 33 



failures to that oue tiling thau to any thing else. All ovei- the coiinti-y 

 we see where people have set out orchards of different descriptions that 

 have failed to produce a profitable crop sini}>ly because they were set 

 upon land that was not adapted to growing fruit. 



Perhaps it is a hard matter to always know how to pick out the proper 

 I)lace. This can be divided into two questions. Here's a man that wants 

 to plant a small orchard for family use, and have a few to sell. There 

 is no place on his farm adapted to growing that fruit, and yet he must 

 take into consideration that he would like to have this fruit near his 

 house, but near his house, perhaps, the ground is not suitable. I would 

 not refuse to plant any trees, because I did not have the best land for 

 orchard planting, but I would pick out some point where I thought they 

 would grow best. Then there are sections where the whole country is 

 well adapted to growing fruit and the person could not make any mis- 

 take along that line. 



Now, in regard to the kind of soil. I have thought before now that 

 I could tell the kind of soil I wanted to grow fruit on. I have seen 

 very successful orchards on sand, on heavy clay, also on gravel and on 

 a great many variations from sand to the clay and gravel. I never saw 

 a successful orchard on muck, hence I naturally think that muck places 

 would be a poor place for an orchard. But I will say this, I have been 

 somewhat stumped on looking at the soil to see what it would produce, — 

 the best results, in some localities or in some parts of the site, for in- 

 stance, Avhere the soil varies, — it would be hard to tell unless you had 

 planted an orchard and had grown it for twenty years, which part of 

 that land would be best, perhaps the part that you would decide on as 

 jbeing the best would prove to the contrary and vice versa. Hence, I 

 say it is impossible to see on looking at the surface of the soil exactly 

 what that soil will produce. Now, for an illustration — the present year 

 I rented an orchard to a neighbor, and in that orchard there was a 

 gravelly knoll and they were throwing out gravel to make cement. One 

 said to me that he could ^ef a good deal more money out of that land 

 at fifteen cents to twenty-five cents a yard than growing apples, hence 

 he opened up a pit in the middle of the orchard and they had dug into 

 some of the trees and let them down into the pit and had taken them 

 away. He said to me when T rented the orchard that the trees that grew 

 on that gravel knoll did not grow veiw fast nor produce much fruit. 

 Now on looking it over I saw that the trees had not made so much growth 

 as in some other parts of the orchard, but I did not wonder at this, when 

 I learned that the orchnrd had never been cultivated since it was set out 

 twenty years before, it having been used simply as a pasture for sheep 

 and hogs. 



What I want to say is that I was very much surprised to find that 

 some of the veiw nicest fruit in that orchard grew right on the top of 

 that knoll. There was a little soil on that surface, reddish clay and 

 gravel soil, that one might naturally think would not produce f to it, 

 but it certainly did giA'e an excellent yield, and T have some specimens 

 of apples that came off that knoll, what are known as Steele's Eed, and 

 T am sure that you will agree with me that they are good enough for 

 anyone. (Exhibiting specimen.) 



And in this connection I want to digress a bit to say that I have tried 

 hard to make the people believe that we should call this apple Canada 

 5 



