FORTY-FOURTH ANNUAL REPORT. 85 



self done, or asked some of the boys who teach agriculture in the high 

 schools, to do some thinning in the way of demonstration, and I do not 

 think that more than one man, who owned the trees thinned, ever said 

 that it was not a good thing. This one man never said anything about 

 it, but he never thinned his trees afterward, so I assumed he did not 

 approve of it. 



The others have thinned for years. There are at least half a dozen 

 men here for whom I did some thinning last summer. I remember Mr. 

 Hopkins, it was just two years ago that I gave a thinning demonstration 

 in his orchard. He has been thinning ever since. There were about 

 twenty-five apple and peach growers there and every one said that the 

 trees could hold every apple that was on them. I picked about nine 

 hundred off one tree. We came back in October to grade and pack. One 

 of the trees next to this was left unthinned and in October it was split 

 right in the middle. Down in the basement in the center of the hall 

 you will find on a platform two groups of apples — the group on the 

 south half is a crop from an unthinned tree and the apples on the north 

 half are from a thinned tree. These apples came from Mr. Stoddard's 

 orchard and he is going to tell you what he did. 



Mr. Stoddard: I will say in the beginning that I am not proud of 

 that display of apples, but they are what we have this year, so I will 

 have to take the medicine. The tree Mr. White speaks of was one of 

 the first trees thinned. We probably took off about 60% in thinning 

 and if we had taken off 75% or even 80% the crop would have been much 

 better. The other tree was left in the orchard without thinning. The 

 crops of these two trees are shown in order to point out the difference 

 in the crops from thinned and unthinned trees. I think thinning is well 

 worth while. We are going to keep on thinning our apple trees. We 

 trimmed our Baldwin trees about 75% or 80% and have increased the 

 size of our apples and the value of our crops. 



Mr. Ladd : In regard to thinning — we have eight acres of apple trees 

 fifty years old. We have for several years thinned the Wagners and the 

 Duchess and this year we thinned the Sweeneys and we have the largest 

 apples we have ever grown in the orchard, due largely to the fact that 

 we thinned the fruit. It cost us about seventy-five or ninety cents a 

 tree to thin, I feel that we have been more than repaid for doing it. 



