62 State Horiicultural Society. 



During the second year's growth keep the top as even as possible, 

 or a little heavy to southwest. jSText winter or spring cut back again to 

 four or five buds. Good tillage should have been given and must be 

 continued, and if the growth is great clip the ends of all limbs as fast as 

 they make eighteen inches growth. This will bring out laterals and fit 

 the tree for making a full crop of fruit without carrying it on ends of 

 long branches, as so many of our four-year-old trees are allowed to do. 

 This is the year that our peach trees are oftenest spoiled. The growth 

 is great; the fruit buds are at the extremities of the branches and pruning 

 back as much as the making of a perfect tree requires will remove 

 nearly all blossom buds, and so we are to leave the branches and fit the 

 tree for dehorning in after years, a thing never necessary if each suc- 

 cessive season has its proper work done. It requires the same nerve to 

 rightly prune a peach tree during its first three years as to properly thin 

 its fruit when overloaded. The man who thinned his peaches sufficiently 

 the first time he tried it has not yet made himself known. The work 

 should be done before the pits begin to harden. 



Leave the best fruit at distances of four to six inches. When your 

 tree is full and you have to take off three or four and leave one, it looke 

 like a destructive process, but it will pay. The vitality of the tree is taxed, 

 not in growing the large fruit, but in producing too many seeds, and 

 there is more profit in one bushel of extra choice fruit than in a wagon 

 load of culls. 



There are numerous enemies of all kinds of fruit and the peach has 

 its full share; but thanks to the chance, or the intention, in the location 

 of "Grand Old Missouri," she is escaping the most destructive of them. 

 Coming to this section over ten years ago from the very center of the 

 Michigan peach belt, I Avas naturally inquisitive as to the advantages for 

 peach growers here, and finding a man who seemed willing to answer, 

 I plied him with numerous queries and finally asked: ''Do you have the 

 yellows here?" He promptly and with evident satisfaction, replied* 

 "Yes, sir; great big, nice ones." He would hardly believe I had referred 

 to a disease. I have not yet heard of a case of the yellows in our statr*. 

 and perhaps the long sought for cure, or prevention, may be found before 

 the worst enemy the peach grower has yet had to deal with comes to 



