36 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



not know very much about your market conditions, what you are grow- 

 ing your small fruits for. The way we look at it, when we go into the 

 fruit business, we want to know where we are going to market; what 

 will give us the best results; and plant for it. I plant enough so that 

 we will have a sufficient quantity to supply the demand and get the 

 price and have a volume sufficient to enable us to get the freight-rates we 

 should. In so doing, we may be able to keep the market supplied, and 

 possibly to the exclusion of other places. 



Just to give you briefly an outline of the district there, will say we 

 have a strip of land that corresponds with the level of Lake Erie, and 

 tliis ridge runs along from the southeast to the northwest. It drops 

 abruptly in most places, and there is a narrow stretch of country run- 

 ning along the foot of the ridge. That level below runs from 15 to 30 

 foot above the lake level. 



Lake Ontario is nearly 3,000 feet above the sea level. Along that 

 stretch of country we grow all kinds of fruits to perfection — peaches, 

 grapes and all those tender fruits, and we are not troubled to any great 

 extent with the frost. Where you get a little higher there is another 

 trouble, the vegetal ion starts earlier and the frost is more severe than 

 near the wafer where it is held back. Another trouble is, the bulk 

 of that land further back is heavy. I am inclined to think under certain 

 conditions cultivation would help, if moisture could be kept in the 

 land. Where the ground is moist, that draws the frost away from 

 the vegetation, and we have a crop. 



1 have different kinds of land. The freeze of sixteen years ago, the 

 28th of May, that killed our peach orchards, hit me. I had one field 

 with only a ditch between them — one field was clay that we were not 

 working so as to keep the vegetation back; the other was a sandy field 

 and had not been worked. After that freeze I said "I will sell my 

 crop on this field for half price" and after I examined it, I said, "I 

 will sell my whole peach crop on that field for $5.00." On the other 

 field I had three-fourths of a crop — the freeze went into the vegeta- 

 tion. 



We are growing our fruit largely for canning factories and distribu- 

 lion throughout the country. Our small fruits in the first state are 

 shipped through the province of Ontario and the east. Very little of 

 it goes west. Our other fruits, plums, grapes, and to some extent, 

 peaches are sent to the western provinces, where they are competing 

 with your western fruits, and British Columbia. 



We are growing more currants and goose-berries than eight or ten 

 years past. Prices then went very low and we went out of the busi- 

 ness; but now owing to the markets in the west, we are planting quite 

 a good deal more extensively of currants, both red and black, and of 

 goose-berries. 



As to the methods of cultivation I suppose you want that more than 

 anything else. I am a worker and not a public speaker and so I can 

 answer questions better than I can make a speech, and now would 

 like to have you ply me with any questions you see fit. 



