194 State Hor-ticultural Society. 



select the proper varieties which the buyers will want ten years from 

 now, to give the proper attention in the way of pruning, cultivating, 

 spraying, etc., and to produce an orchard that will be pleasing to the 

 eye, give intense satisfaction to the owner for all the labor and money 

 he has expended on it and that will pay his mortgages and swell his bank 

 account. 



GATHEKI^TG AND MAKKETING OF THE APPLE CROP. 



By A. Nelson, Lebanon, Mo. 



The year now closing will prove, on the whole, to be a 

 most disastrous year to the general fruit interests of the country. The 

 first main cause was the under estimate of the fruit crop for 1899. The 

 buyers, or many of them, started out with the idea there were no apples, 

 which was in part true so far as our state was concerned. I believe 

 the estimate I put on the crop in our part of the state was over instead 

 of under. I never put it at over 30 per cent of a full crop and now the 

 crop is marketed it turns out less than 25 per cent of a crop, and about 

 90 per cent of what was packed should have gone to evaporators, can- 

 ning factories and the cider mill. Results have already shown to this 

 society that this is only too true. What can we as a society do to cor- 

 rect this evil, and an evil which if encouraged will bring disastrous 

 results to the great fruit interests of Missouri ? Let us look back for a 

 moment upon the results of this kind of packing to our friends, the 

 strawberry growers. Many of those hard working men thought the 

 market would take anything in the shape of berries, and no doubt 

 some went as far as some of our apple growers and pulled up vines and 

 all and filled the boxes as the apple men put in culls and No. 2 stock 

 which they thought were plenty good. We all know the disastrous 

 result from such packing, and what is true of our berry friends is more 

 than true with the apple growers; any apple as large as a persimmon 

 must go in a barrel and at full price. With the facts as above stated; 

 much of the fruit that has been packed to glut our markets and break 

 down the prices of fair to good fruit, should have been consumed on the 



