482 REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE 



water. The combined treatment, used in Benton Harbor, of 

 ashes and boiling water should be freely tried. 



The practice of some nurserymen, who are ambitious to 

 have large and fine-looking trees to tempt the thoughtless pur- 

 chaser, of stimulating the growth in the nursery rows by lib- 

 eral use of stimulating manure, should be discouraged. Stable 

 manure in the unfermented state is so freely used that the 

 trees are forced and pushed forward as if by hot-house culture. 

 When such trees are transferred to the orchard, they are un- 

 healthy, the growth is checked from want of the stimulating 

 food to which they have been accustomed, and they soon die, 

 or fall a prey to the Yellows. 



Of course no pomologist needs to be warned to avoid using 

 buds from diseased trees. 



Too much importance cannot be attached to the proper 

 selection of peach-pits to form the nursery stocks. I heartily 

 indorse the advice so often given, to select pits from districts . 

 known to be free from the Yellows. Nurserymen are too care- 

 less or indifferent on this point, oi' else are unable to obtain a 

 sufficient supply from healthy districts. 



When going through the canning-house of the Excelsior 

 Packing Co.. in Benton Harbor, where large quantities of 

 peaches ai-e canned, I saw many baskets of peach-pits, and was 

 told that they were already sold to nurserymen, and that it was 

 ditficult to fill all the orders for peach-pits. Yet very many 

 of these peach-pits were, unquestionably, from diseased peaches, 

 and all of them were from trees in which the fruit-forminff 

 tendency was excessively developed, at the expense of the con- 

 stitutional vigor of the tree, and not one of these pits was fit 

 for use as nursery stocks. The nursery stock, like Caesar's 

 wife, " should be above suspicion.'" It is very important that 

 peach-pits, for nursery stocks, should be obtained from regions 

 free from the Yellows. But this is not enough : no pits should 

 ~be used from trees where the wood-forming vigor is so far 

 checked that the leaves have a yellow cast. Many seedling 



