ANNUAL WINTER MEETING AT WARRENSBURG. 171 



horse to a stake with plenty of food all around him. It may be more 

 severe on our prairies than some others, because they make the finest 

 of hay and a very close sod, but I see the same indications mentioned 

 even in New York. And the rule was there thirty years ago, that 

 when a tree made less than six to twelve inches of growth, it needed' 

 cultivation. Here I have searched whole orchards in vain for a two 

 inch cion. 



Whenever the orchard is seeded down, it will go to bearing, like it 

 would from any other injury, and continue so for perhaps five to eight 

 years, and then it will surely begin to fail, to the great astonishment 

 and disgust of the owner. If it were a cow, he would probably feel of 

 the horns to guess if they were hollow, but scarcely dream of her hollow 

 belly, though almost visible between the ribs. The tree shows just as 

 unmistakable signs of starvation, by failing to make a lively growth of 

 wood, as well as making small, nurly fruit, yet he has probably never 

 thought of noticing: that. AVeeds or clover are not near as bad as grass- 

 sod, especially if no tramping of stock is allowed, but they cannot be 

 recommended as the best that can be done, unless clover is plowed 

 under as soon as it gets its full growth. 



On these premises it seems very safe to predict that we will con- 

 tinue to have short crops and failures until we change our methods and 

 try to deserve better. I sometimes think it a very beneficent provision 

 that we cannot make anything without studying and working for it — 

 that it gives a laboring man a chance n(>t vouchsafed to the easy and 

 careless chaps. Bat at other times it seems we can put in a giod deal 

 of vain labor, too, because we know so little about nature and her 

 operations. 



I had some rather bitter experience of that kind this year with the 

 codling moth. 



I put paper bands on the trees in good time, and as soon as the 

 worms matured, we found and killed a goodly number, 'The trees were 

 free from scales, and the ground cultivated and hoed in raspbeiries, 

 etc., leaving apparently little other shelter for the worms. And what 

 we caught seemed to be in fair proportion to the number of apples 

 stung. Most of those stung this early fell to the ground at some time, 

 but I never could find a worm in a fallen apple, hence hogs or sheep 

 could not hive served me. I flittered myself with abundant success 

 in exterminating the first crop of worms, and thinkyetthat I did proxi- 

 mately clean them out, and according to the reports of their history, 

 that should have made me proximately exempt from the second crop. 

 When they became rather scarce in August, I began to think myself 

 safe. But judge of my disappointment, if you can, when they began to 



