84 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



places in Michigan where success could be made and what he told me 

 about thinning peaches, I apjilicd to ai)[)les and settled here in this 

 state and some of my \arieties 1 thinned systematically and I am de- 

 cidedly of the opinion that the man who does not thin, makes a great 

 mistake. 



Member: Aery few in our section thinned the fruit. This year we 

 thinned seventeen acres of apples. The cost was seventy-five cents or 

 .fl.OO per tree and I want to tell you that I wouht not have had money 

 enough to come here today unless I had thinned the trees. These trees 

 are going to bear the best fruit I have ever had. If you let trees do 

 all they can one year, they are not so good the next year but if you 

 thin your trees this year and take good care of them you are going to 

 have a good cro]> again next year. You can surely afford to pick some of 

 the fruit in the si)ring and throw it on the ground and then have a 

 better grade than you would have had. 



Mr. Farrand : . i have been waiting all these years for someone to 

 say "T have done so and so; it has cost me so and so; the profit has 

 been so much." I have thinned young trees a great many times and 

 liave occasionally thinned old trees, but I do not know what it has 

 cost. I have a liundred acres of forty or fifty-year-old apple trees and 

 I doubt whether it would pay to thin those trees. 



Mr. Morrill: I am not an apple man, but I have thinned peaches up 

 to a hundred acres at a time. Really a man ought to go West occasion- 

 ally and see how they do things out there. I have been working there 

 (piite a bit and concluded that thinning was the proper caper. Some 

 men would take a contract to do this work and would cover a big terri- 

 tory. This is certainly the way to handle a big thing for it pays. 

 \Vhile it may cost seventy-five cents or even |1.25 per tree to thin the 

 apples, they will probably bring from fifty cents to fl.OO per barrel more 

 in price, and this certainly pays. If I had a large apple orchard I would 

 thin it by all means. 



I just want to say a word in regard to annual bearing. I believe the 

 nearest approach you can come to it is a good culture. Don't you think 

 so, Mr. President? 



A. I think it is. 



Mr. IMorrill : T think that an orchard of apple, peach, pear or plum 

 trees is not so much different from the horse in your stable. You take 

 him out and work him hard all day, but if yon treat him right — feed 

 him, water him and treat him kindly, he will come in the collar again 

 tomoiiow and do a good day's work. You and I are the same and the 

 tree is not so ditferent from what we are. I think if you treat a tree 

 as you should and as you would anything that yields, it will come back 

 to you as regular as circumstances will permit. 



Probably some of the older men here will remember that in 1909 in 

 the West the thermometer went down to twenty-four degrees below zero 

 and there were very few peaches east of the Rocky Mountains. I had 

 forty acres and sold them for |25,000.00. I cannot explain why I had 

 j)ractically the only crop in that section unless it was because my trees 

 had never been pushed to the point of exhaustion. 



Mr. O. K. White: I think we are going to thin apples just as uni- 

 formly in the next fifteen years as we are spraying them now. During 

 the last three years in a number of places around the state, I have my- 



