No. 7. DEPARTMENT OV AGRICULTURE. 513 



would make sure of a hay crop anyway. I said to him, "Your or- 

 chard has gone to grass sure." Cultivate your peach orchard just 

 as early as possible the very first thing in the spring. Let it be 

 April and May and well into June. If you don't seed to a cover crop 

 then let it go to weeds, but don't let it go until June or even the 

 middle of July. I repeat, cultivate early and cut it up thoroughly 

 and often, but late in season. Let it grow up to grass and weeds, 

 rather than cultivate too late. 



The pruning question is an important one along with the necessity 

 for spraying. We must have low^ headed trees. Some gentleman 

 was telling here today — I thought he was stretching it a little bit — - 

 about his trees being higher than the ceiling of this hall, but he was 

 talking about apple trees. We want low headed peach trees. In 

 planting I cut the stems down to eight or ten inches, and build up 

 my tree, and prune with the general object in view of having a broad 

 low headed tree. Just how to do that, each one must study it out 

 for himself. You can't tell how to trim a peach tree any more than 

 you can tell about hugging a girl. Just do the proper thing at the 

 right time, the peach will show you how by her blushes. 



A Member. — How will you cultivate them if they are low down? 



MR. HALE. — Take a mule or two, and then take two spring tooth 

 harrows, divide them and put a wooden "spreader between them and 

 let one of them go up close to the trees and while you and the horses 

 are going merrily down between the middle of the rows of trees, the 

 harrows will be doing their work. Clear up under the low heads. • 



The question is often asked, why do you get such good fruit from 

 two or three thousand miles away? Because they have to grow, 

 pick and pack them properly in order to get them to market. We 

 want these low headed trees, because we want to get to the tree 

 and spra}', prune, thin and pick the fruit more easily, because in such 

 cases w^e can come up to the tree and do all the work without the 

 use of long ladders that add 60 to 80 per cent, to the labor cost. 



I repeat that we must spray the trees. The Lord and the San 

 Jos6 Scale — I don't know whether they are in partnership, but the 

 pest has brought about a benefit in more ways than one. When we 

 are annoyed with them we must spray our trees, or our trees will die. 

 The ''Bugologists" have been telling us for the last twenty-five years 

 that w^e should spray, but we did not believe them, and nov/ the 

 San Jos6 Scale says we, must, and therefore we have gone to work 

 in the spraying of our fruit trees, to get rid of this pest, and in doing 

 so, we also aid the tree in various ways, for the lime and sulphur 

 spray mixture, best for destroying scale, is also a superb fungicide, 

 a preventive of monilia and leaf curl, smuts and sooty fungus. 



Another point about which I wish to saj^ a word, is the necessity 

 of thinning the tree of surplus fruit, in order, by taking off all 

 the imperfect specimens, and more, if necessary, that we can raise 

 a big crop of more perfect fruit. The thinning of the fruit is essen- 

 tial, first, in order to got a larger peach, and secondly, in order to 

 get a better colored peach, and thirdly, to get a better flavored peach. 

 So a tree that would naturally bear, perhaps, a thousand peaches, 

 should be thinned down to four hundred, the four hundred will bring 



33—7—1906. 



