82 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 



INIr. Hale: I do not believe it. 



Mr. Morrill : He said that curl-leaf had weakened them so that he had ani 

 idea there would be a lot of them pulled out— the majority of them. 



Mr. Hale: It is a fact that our Elberta trees did not recover so as to- 

 look healthy this fall. Every leaf was taken off, nearly. 



Mr. Morrill: I do not think they will be planted next spring to any 

 great extent. I think the people are going to wait. 



Mr. Monroe: How much did you have? 



Mr. Hale: Less than a third of a crop. I do not think, taking the- 

 county through, there is over a tenth of a crop. 



Mr. Monroe: Take the county as a whole? 



Mr. Hale: Yes, sir. There were places having some varieties, especially 

 those that had a large percentage of Early Michigan and Lewis, where 

 they had a fair showing; but take it as a whole, there were orchards where 

 they ought to have had two or three thousand bushels that did not yield 

 fifty bushels, to my knowledge. 



Q: Did you learn anything about the value of thinning, this year? 



Mr. Hale: We learned the value last year of thinning. 



Mr. Morrill : You learned that there were seasons in which you did not 

 have to thin, did you not? 



Mr. Hale: Yes, sir. 



Mr. Keid: Well, has it called people's attention to that point? 



Mr. Hale: Yes, sir; and yet there is one thing that we notice this year,, 

 and I would like to have brought out sometime: We naturally thought, 

 this year, having a very spare crop on the trees, that there would be good' 

 peaches; and in many places where we look for large, nice peaches, where; 

 peaches ought to bear well, we did not have many peaches; the peaches did 

 not pull through. 



Q: Did you ever notice that in apples? 



Mr. Hale: Yes, I did. Now, is there not such a thing that, if there is not 

 fruit enough, the growth will go into the wood instead of the fruit? These 

 same trees got an enormous growth of wood, but no fruit. 



Mr. Morrill : Did you not have the same conditions we did early in the 

 season — starting in April, you had a warm time, followed with weather 

 that should have been in March? 



Mr. Hale: Yes, sir. 



Mr. Morrill: And did not the fruit set sntTer through that and become 

 stunted? 



Mr. Keid: Prof. Taft, what do you think causes the condition? 



Prof. Taft: I think there are three or four things. I was speaking this 

 morning about the apple. Of course the two were about the same this 

 year, and it seems to me we might go back a little further and say it was a 

 heavy growth last year that exhausted the trees, and the first thing this 

 year was to get back what they lost; as Mr. Hale suggested, it went into- 

 the tree, probably. You know that in developing fruit any of the plants 

 will draw from the substance of the limbs and leaves and thus develop- 

 the fruit from that, and last year it seems to me it was the enormous crop> 

 we had, j)articularly of the apple and peach, (1896 of course I mean); that 

 the trees did everything they could to develop that crop, even at a loss tO' 

 themselves; and this spring they were weakened, and the weather this 

 spring of course was against them, and in case of both the apple and the 

 peach we had various leaf diseases that, in the case of the peach (curl-leaf). 



