362 STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



number of our amateur growers will try this plan the coming season, and pos- 

 sibly it will pay to grow grapes in this way for the markets. 



SALT FOK PEAR BLIGHT. 



J. S. Woodward, of Lockport, a very successful cultivator of the pear, 

 gives to the Eural New Yorker an account of his application of salt, which he 

 thinks has prevented the blight, lie has an orchard of 3,500 trees of differ- 

 ent ages, all Dachesse. The earth is plowed toward the trees once a year, and 

 the ground kept clear the rest of the season with the cultivator. A light 

 dressing is annually given of salt, wood ashes and bone dust. Mr. Vv". says he 

 would have little fear of the blight where salt is freely used. The freedom of 

 his trees from this disease may, however, be explained without ascribing it to 

 the salt. The Duchesse is remarkable for its power of resisting the disease, 

 and is rarely injured by it in any case. The blight is often entirely absent in 

 pear orchards for a long term of years, whatever the varieties and treatment 

 may be. In a later number of the same journal, another correspondent 

 applied two or three shovelfuls of salt and ashes to each of his pear trees, and 

 the result was the worst blighted trees of any in his neighborhood. It is not 

 probable that the salt caused or prevented blight, properl}^ so called. It 

 undoubtedly killed the trees in the case mentioned, by an overdose, but the- 

 blight comes from another cause. The same writer says it killed his peach 

 trees. We have known two or three quarts of brine poured around a large 

 bearing peach tree to kill it at once. It is doubtless a good application in 

 small quantities, broadcast, and not in a mass at the foot of the stem, but its- 

 effects are moderate and not striking. 



PEAR BLIGHT. 



William Saunders, before the Potomac Fruit Growers' Society, had the fol- 

 lowing : 



The culture of the pear is considered a somewhat dubious undertaking when 

 regarded in the light of a remunerative industry. This is mainly occasioned 

 by the liability of the tree to injury from what is known as blight. For the 

 past fifty years various conjectures have been advanced, and repeated again 

 and again, as to the nature of this disease, without reaching the true source. 



Microscopical examination reveals that it is caused by fungoid growth, which 

 destroys the bark and outer wood of the stems upon which it may happen to 

 vegetate. This discovery agrees perfectly with what we can observe in the 

 spread and progress of the malady, and acting upon the well authenticated 

 influence that sulphur possesses in destroying fungoid mycelium it has been 

 recommended to cover the bark of the trees with a lime wash containiui:^ a 

 certain proportion of sulphur. It is stated that no blight has ever been dis- 

 covered on branches treated with tiiis mixture. Should this prove to bo the 

 case we have, at least, a partial insurance on our pear trees, that is, we can 

 insure the main body of the tree and the principal branches, from the attacks 

 of the fungus, and with branches which it is inconvenient to cover, they can 

 be cut off and burned if they become diseased. 



