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ANNUAL, RBPOl'.T OF THE Off. Doc. 



up and here is the sized mesh that we use. Here is a mesh of cop- 

 per wires, 30 strands to the inch. 



Now some \ears rot is little in evidence and people are apt to relax 

 their vigilance. In fact we have to be brought up with a "round 

 robbin ' sometimes before we do our duty. You know that "when 

 the Devil is sick the Devil a monk would be; when the Devil is 

 well, the Devil a monk is he." Spraying is an insurance. I have 

 found spraving as iudispensible in raising potatoes as fruit. Our 

 strawberries are sprayed at least once. Melons are sprayed as well, 

 and asparagus beds to get rid of beetle. 



We have had bnt one complete failure of peaches in eleven years. 

 We have not had a failure of plum, European, in seven or eight 

 years. We control the curculio by using arsenate of lead and have 

 dispensed with the Geneva Bug' Cart. In 1906 we raised eleven 

 hundred carloads of -grapes and had the rot in control at North 

 East. 



MR. HALE.— I don't know whether I want to ask any question or 

 not, but I have been very much interested in this paper, and more 

 interested in the rot. I think the greatest menace to peach culture 

 is the rot, and therefore, I was interested in this paper today. My 

 experience today in Connecticut and in Georgia is, that taking all 

 the different kinds of specimens, the best thing to do is to gather 

 them and burn every rotten peach as soon as it gets to the ground, 

 and burn it quick. We have men enough to go over the orchard and 

 burn up every rotten peach, and we were laughed at for doing it. 

 We pick all such specimens on the trees and destroyed them. We 

 have sprayed a very strong Bordeaux or copper-sulphate wash when 

 the trees were in a dormant condition; we have tried spraying with 

 a weakened solution wdien the trees were in foliage, and while our 

 friend has done it up in a portion of his orchard, and it is in foliage, 

 don't go home and spray your orchard with Bordeaux mixture: If 

 this gentleman has succeeded in doing it, he has succeeded in doing 

 something that, few in America have succeeded in doing. A num- 

 ber of years ago I sprayed an orchard in Connecticut with four parts 

 of copper-sulphate, and twelve of lime, Bordeaux mixture, and it 

 lost all the foliage. It looked as if it would go to pieces, and I just 

 saved my neck by getting my teams and my neighbors, and scatter- 

 ing over the orchard nitrate of soda, and worked on Sunday to bring 

 about a new foliage. It was such a dropping of foliage that the 

 United States Department of Agriculture sent a man from Wash- 

 ington, and I gave them the orchard to make tests, and they used 

 half a pound up to two pounds of copper of sulphate, to ten pounds 

 of lime, in fifty gallons of water, and every one of them injured the 

 trees to some extent, and there were not one of them worthy of the 

 name of a peach tree. I had been since this shy of spraying peach 

 trees and plum trees with Bordeaux mixture. Four years ago I gave 

 th<^ Department of Agriculture at Washington an opportunity to ex- 

 periment in our Georgia orchard. It cost me three thousand dollars 

 by experimenting with copper-sulphate. I am speaking from the 

 bottom of my heart and pocket book when I say that they suffered so 

 severely and they still wanted to try it. T'wo years ago the Depart- 

 ment at Washington, kept two or three men in my orchard all Sum- 

 mer, and I had them guarantee that they would pay the damage. 



