318 MISSOURI STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



or intend to set out a peach orchard. Never attempt to form a head for 

 the tree when setting it out, but cut it straight as a broom stick and let 

 it form a head at its own leisure ; do not leave any side branches, even 

 if the)- be but two or three inches long, for when they become heavily 

 ladened with fruit or exposed to severe storms, the branches break and 

 split the stem of the tree oftener than pressing clear to the ground, The 

 writer has had an annual loss of seven to eight percent of trees, owing to 

 this cause alone. 'Tis said, one can learn something from failures as well 

 as from successful efforts, and, in order to arrive at the truth, it is as well 

 to confess our mistakes as to trumpet our success, and if this communication 

 should save one or two from committing the same blunder and meeting 

 w^ith similar experience, the writer will be amply repaid for the trouble 

 of writing the same. 



THE HOME OF THE PEACH AND ITS TREATMENT. 



W. G. GANG, OF THE OLDEN FRUIT FARM, HOWELL COUNTY, MO. 



What a wonderful country we have for fruit culture ; no nation 

 possesses such marvelous privileges, no other has made such progress in 

 pomology. 



Being situated on the southern slope of the Ozark mountains, we 

 are protected from the severity of the north and northwestern wintry 

 blasts, and by a succession of mountain ranges in Arkansas on the south- 

 west from the hot blighting winds of July and August. Here, we have 

 a district, as large as the German Empire, where both soil and climate 

 are congenial to the growth of the peach, where no yellows, that formid- 

 able and dreaded disease, that baffles and blasts the prospects of the 

 grower of this luscious fruit, ever invades. Where the much-dreaded 

 enemies of the fruit tree, the borer or gouger and curculio are seldom 

 found ; where nothing hinders the growing of millions of bushels of this 



