Summer Meeting. 15 



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four years we have been fighting canker worms and fungi, or rather 

 playing at it. Early in the spring of 1902 we bought a power sprayer 

 and went at it right ; canker worms, leaf rollers, etc., are done up, but 

 we quit too soon to keep down all the scab fungi. The contrast in the ap- 

 pearance of our orchard now and three years ago is very marked. 



Why are so many of our orchards unprofitable and short-lived, in 

 these days of books and horticultural journals of the first class, when 

 there are so many to exploit their methods of planting which range 

 from crowbars to dynamite, their methods of culture which range from . 

 clean cultivation through the summer to a blue grass sod? When we 

 have steam engines and dust machines galore to spray our trees with 

 and even galvanic batteries to give the poor insects an electric shock 

 if they attempt to crawl up the tree, it would seem as though the or- 

 chardist would have no trouble in getting rich and prolonging the life 

 of his trees to a good old age. 



During the war a certain preacher was expatiating on power, 

 resources, moral right and providence all being on the side of the north, 

 and dramatically exclaimed, "If these things be for us, who can be against 

 us?" Up jumped a little Irishman and shouted, "Jeff. Davis and the 

 Devil, bedad !" The man who raises apples for a Hving has many things 

 against him. Within four miles of our place there are five twenty-acre 

 oichards planted about the same time as ours in the spring of 1883, just 

 twenty years ago. Three have been in timothy sod and mowed. One in 

 clover and mowed, and the other in weeds. These five orchards have 

 never paid the interest and taxes on the land, and under present treat- 

 ment are not likely to do so. Two of the owners of these orchards say 

 they don't believe in breaking up the roots of an orchard. Neither do 

 we, except to a limited extent ; we use the disc and common harrow and 

 they answer all requirements for cultivating an orchard. 



We are not an advocate of continuous yearly cultivation till late 

 in the summer. It defeats one of the objects of tillage, which is to 

 add fertility as well as to hold moisture. Another cause why an orchard 

 is not good when it is old is lack of pruning. I know many people 

 boast of never having put a knife in an orchard, and others go to the 

 distressing extreme of the tree butcher. I am inclined to think that most 

 of our orchard trees carry entirely too much wood to be productive, es- 

 pecially on our rich prairie soils. Slow-growfng trees in sod are injured 

 worse by pruning than thrifty trees under cultivation, but pruning should 

 be done regularly, moderately, with good judgment and common sense. 

 We much prefer the dormant season for pruning. Too close planting 

 is an error too often made. In one of our orchards the trees are set 



