104 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 



cussed at considerable length. An old gentleman from one of the river 

 counties made the statement that he believed he had the most successful 

 and the cheapest cold storage of any of them; and it developed that he 

 .goes into his orchard, makes bins eight feet wide and any length that he 

 pleases, according to the amount of his apples, and just lays boards on the 

 bottom; picks his apples and pours them in until they are six or eight 

 feet deep; lays loose boards across the tops of the bins, and puts a slanting 

 roof over them, pajdng no further attention to them until spring. He 

 was plied with questions, and I asked him how low a temperature he had 

 ever known there. He mentioned a time a number of years ago when the 

 temperature went twenty-two degrees below zero and did not get up 

 within ten of zero for over a week. The apples came out perfect. He says 

 you could go in the winter and lift one of the boards that just lay loosely 

 across, just enough to shut the light out (that is what he seemed to wish 

 to do, to shut the light away from the apples) but you could not see an 

 apple. He says you see just a mass of frost all over the top of the apples, 

 and he has never lost one per cent, in fifteen years' storage of apples in. 

 that way. In response to a good many questions, he was prepared on 

 every point, and he had at least a half a dozen of his neighbors in the 

 audience who testified to the fact that he did keep apples in that way, and 

 kept them successfully, and he has 160 acres of apples. The only objec- 

 tion to it is that one can not go in the winter and take out apples if he 

 wishes to. They must not be disturbed. You must wait until they thaw 

 out in the spring, and then sell quickly. But he stores his apples thus and 

 gets through absolutely without loss, no matter what the tem])erature 

 has been. When the question was put to him, " But suppose you have a 

 long warm spell, as you sometimes have down there?" He said, "My 

 apples are mostly Ben Davis and Missouri Pippin. Theyxare sound when 

 winter sets in, and then we have a mass of apples eight feet deep. We 

 have simply a single tier of boards (good, tight, matched lumber), and 

 the air can not go through them. There is not change enough in tempera- 

 ture in the bins to ever thaw the outside tier of apples, until it comes 

 settled warm weather. Then they will thaw out gradually," and he says 

 there was a time when he planted his corn before he opened his apple bins. 

 In taking them out there will be masses of apples all frozen together. 



Q: Those are waste, I suppose. 



Mr. Morrill: No, he says if he gets a bunch like that he lays them out 

 carefull}^ in the shade, and in three or four hours they are comparatively 

 all right, but he knows they will go down quickly. 1 was speaking to a 

 Chicago commission man about this as I came home. He said, "We had a 

 car of apples on the siding here half of last winter, and we paid track 

 charges on them, because when we went to them (they came from western 

 New York) they were frozen, and we feared if we moved them we Avould 

 spoil them. One load came up to the store and they spoiled as soon as 

 the}' thawed out. We expected the apples in the car to thaw, but they did 

 not until in the spring, and we brought them up and sold them in better 

 condition than anything that we had taken from the cars and put into cold 

 storage. There was less repacking." There have been numerous instances 

 of that kind that look as though we do not have just exactly the right idea 

 of apple storage. It is a fnot tlint the cold-storage houses of Chicago hold 

 a temperature of about thirty-five degrees as nearly as they can. Now,, 

 if these things occur where they have absolute control of the temperature^ 



