38 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



the reporters of the papers would give it out that these fruit growers 

 are making their thousands. A man that cannot clear up $10,000 is no 

 good, they say, and it is such, stories that induce a lot of people to 

 go into the fruit business only to be greatly disappointed and to suffer 

 severe loss. There is an expense connected with all these that few 

 people think of. But it is possible to make these large amounts from 

 the land and that is why we look for land to go up to $2,000 an acre. 

 These people who have bought there of late at these high prices seem 

 to be well satisfied with their bargains and nearly everyone of them 

 could sell at an advance should he put his land on the market. And 

 us I said, the reason for this is that there are those who are making 

 these large amounts out of the land. 



Some have said, "I will go to some other point where I can buy 

 land at from $100 to $200 per acre instead of paying these large 

 amounts." My advice is to buy close in, even though the land is much 

 higher in price. You are then close to shipping facilities and you are 

 where you can be in competition with the factories, and there are 

 many other advantages that might be named which will compensate 

 for the higher price of land, one of them being that you can buy your 

 supplies at the lowest possible price through companies which you 

 could not do otherwise. 



A Member — Explain the inter-planting — do you grow small fruits 

 between tree plants when they are growing up? 



Mr. Thompson — When we are planting out orchards, even our cur- 

 rant, we plant them eight feet apart. The first year we plant vegetables 

 in between these. When planting out fruit trees we plant more largely 

 of vegetables. A good many plant strawberries. Where the land is 

 high in value we plant in between those trees raspberries or currants 

 or gooseberries — that is, where the land would be cut up in five or 

 ten acre lots, or where a man is pretty greedy, but if a man has twenty 

 acres the question of labor comes in and this not so often done. We 

 do not plant small fruits in between our plums or peaches or pears 

 but between our apples. We follow that method until the trees get 

 up to 5 or 6 years old or older say 8 or 10 years, and then they require 

 all the land and what we get off the land as a catch crop cost more to 

 grow than what we realize from it. The trees are all the way from 

 15 to 1G feet each way and up to 18 feet. The favorite distance in put- 

 ting tires is IS by 22, or 20 by 20 feet. 



A Member — How about your fertilizer? 



Mr. Thompson — As to fertilizer used, would say, that we use 

 principally barnyard manure and the straight artificial chemical fertil- 

 izer. 



A Voice —By thai you mean commercial fertilizers. 



Mr. Thompson — We are using steamed bone, acid rock for the phos- 

 phoric acid. We are using acid phosphate especially where we have 

 vegetables. In that case we }^q three parts of bone to one part of 

 potash for the trees. That is on fairly light land. On our heavier 

 land we do not use so much potash. If we want to get results quickly 

 that year we use the acid rock. It is a little cheaper per cent on the 

 analysis, and it gives us quicker results on the vegetables. We use 

 this in the proportion of 750 pounds of acid rock, 750 pounds of bone 



