PROCEEDINGS OF THE SUMMER MEETING. 155 



might be done by others. I hope there are others who are cultivating as 

 thoroughly as he does. And then, he is not afraid to fertilize. I believe 

 he sajs he puts on 100 bushels of uuleached wood ashes to the acre. How 

 many fertilize like that? 



I was in one of Mr. Hale's orchards, some years ago, and he told me 

 that in one orchard he had put |2,000 worth of muriate of potash. It 

 might seem that it would take a good deal of " nerve " to do that, but 

 he got it all back again. He was not in it for fun. He was in it in a 

 business way, and it is the way to do. If you don't feed your orchard 

 it won't yield you an income; it can not, any more than a horse can do 

 his day's work without being fed. Another thing, if you are going to 

 work a horse next week, you don't wait until next week to feed him. You 

 feed him this week and the week before and the week after, and then 

 the horse will be in good condition. Get your orchards into good con- 

 dition, beginning with the time you plant them, and keep them so as long 

 as you have them in your care. Then your trees are getting ready to 

 sustain the crop, if there is one. 



Another point is this: there are a great many people, judging by the 

 crops they grow, who grow more peach pits than anything else. There 

 will often be a twig supporting five or six peaches, that should have but 

 one; and that one peach, if the other five are taken off, will grow to weigh 

 and measure nearly as much as the whole six would have done, and you 

 get rid of the expense of making those five other peach pits; and they 

 take away the manurial value of the land more than any other part of 

 the fruit. So why grow peach pits? You know what they bring when 

 they go on the market. Those six little peaches won't bring half as 

 much as the one big peach would have brought. 



Some one may say, " Well, I can not afford to thin ; think how much 

 trouble it will take!" Now, just think of it. You are going to pick them 

 anyway, and isn't it easier to do it as Mr. Morrill is doing, to have some 

 one jerk them off and drop them on the ground, than to make six different 

 motions for those six peaches, to say nothing of the packing and market- 

 ing? Isn't it cheaper to thin than to leave them on? I don't think we 

 consider that subject enough. Mr. Hale of Connecticut has thinned GOO 

 acnes of peaches this year. Mr. A. T. Hatch of California, who was the 

 pioneer of this peach-thinning business, says that he began his experi- 

 ments by taking certain rows. He would take off a quarter of the fruit 

 from ope roAV, and then he would leave a row without thinning at all, 

 and then he would thin a larger proportion of the fruit on the next row, 

 and then leave another row untouched; and he kept on that way until he 

 took off nearly all the peaches from some of the trees. Then he weighed 

 the product of these different trees and sold them on the market, separ- 

 ately, and he found that about a fair rule to follow was to thin the 

 peaches so that the Chinamen (they use them there) could spread a hand 

 right between two peaches, leaving a space of five or six inches between 

 the fruits. We might think that was very severe thinning, but I think 

 you will find by observation and experiment what the result of this thing 

 is. 



This is the sort of commercial fruitgrowing that will pay, not only with 

 the peach but with the pear and apple and anytliiiig else. This same- 

 2(t 



