300 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



weeks paid a net profit of more than |20,000. It cost more than |4,00a 

 to do it. 



Mr. Moseley: How large are those trees? 



Mr. Hale: They are four-year-old trees, very well developed. It looks 

 like a big jar. In talking of a plum tree being jarred for cureulio, I said^ 

 "Good gracious, shake that tree a week and it will cost more than the 

 thing comes to"; and when I talked to my horticultural friends about 

 jarring for cureulio on a hundred thousand trees, they simply said the 

 thing could not be done; but we went at it, and so thoroughly systema- 

 tized it that we went over 50,000 trees per day, over the entire orchard 

 every two days, and kept it up seven weeks, and the result was that we 

 had a crop of sound fruit and our neighbors did not. Now, that of course 

 was a good thing for me. It was a good thing for the people in the 

 markets who want nice fruit, and seeing it was going to be such an 

 everlastingly good thing for them, they paid for the banging, I didn't; 

 and it is the same way with you — they will pay for it, and the time will 

 come when you will have to do it, and it will probably be a blessing 

 rather than a curse. 



This building up of the orchard, this feeding it, this cultivating it, thi» 

 priming it, this caring for it at all times, is the one thing that is going 

 to bring success. You know the Good Book tells you that you 

 know not at what hour the Master cometh. That means not only one 

 master, but all the others. The master crop may come at any time ; j^ou 

 know not when it is coming, you must be ready for it, you must always 

 be ready, and the only way to be ready is to build right up all the way 

 through and expect you are going to get a crop; if it fails on account of 

 adverse conditions, that is not your fault. 



When you have a crop of peaches on your trees, then comes the next 

 thing, the condition of the fruit. You can not grow peaches successfully 

 if you have not the moral courage to thin the fruit. A peach should 

 never be within six inches of any other peach on the tree, if you want 

 good peaches, and thinning may be done in years of great abundance 

 largely by pruning. I suppose that is the way Brother Morrill does. In 

 years when the trees set full of fruit you can do much of that thinning by 

 pruning, and cut off quantities of it; but later it must be done by hand, 

 and later you must go over those trees and pick off all the inferior-looking 

 specimens first, and then thin down so that they are not within six inches 

 of each other, and I think the fellow who talks to you twenty-five years 

 from now will say they should not be within a foot of each other, if you 

 want peaches for the market, though I think today six inches will do. I 

 talked four inches a year ago, and I have got up to eight, so that I 

 believe in eight really, but I think the time will come when we will say 

 a foot, and then you will have peaches that you can talk about being, 

 not so many "inches" around, but so many "feet" around! 



There should be in every orchard or every neighborhood a large central 

 packing-shed. Now, the man with a small acreage can not do all the 

 things that the man with the great acreage can, but he can get together 

 with a lot of his neighbors who have small acreages; there should be a 

 central packing-house to which the fruit should go. In every large 

 orchard you will have your own sheds — perhaps in every orchard that 

 exceeds twenty acres in extent, or perhaps over fifteen, but there should 



