THE MONTHLY BULLETIN. 303 



noticed while visitiiiy lai-ge markets in the East in the month of 

 December that many of the AVestern pears were allowed to hang on 

 the trees too long, thus becoming coarse and grannlar. However, others 

 are undoubtedly picked too green, and are leathery, colorless and 

 tasteless. We must give this question of marketing closer attention 

 than we have given it in the past. Do a little advertising; try to 

 produce delicious varieties of pears all over the United States. I feel 

 that we can increase very materially the demand for pears. There 

 are very few people in the United States who know three varieties of 

 pears, and if these people only knew how delicious a fruit the pear 

 really is, they would gladly bu}- larger quantities. 



NURSERY FUMIGATION. 



By J. A. Prizer, San Diego Land Corporation, Chula Vista, California. 



Scale insects in citrus nurseries, may at times, become quite a prablem 

 and if present even to a slight extent, must be taken care of to insure 

 healthy and clean stock. Fumigation is. of course, the most efficient 

 method of handling the scale, but when confronted with a black scale 

 infestation nursery fumigation seemed to us to present some unknown 

 difficulties. No doubt many nurserymen have handled nursery fumi- 

 gation, ])ut it had never been our good fortune to see any such work 

 carried on and so we were forced to develop our own scheme. We were 

 fortunate enough, however, to possess a number of good forty-four 

 foot tents and so concluded that the reasonable thing for us to do was 

 to build a frame that would support one of these tents and yet make its 

 movement through the nursery comparatively easy. Such a frame was 

 built and proved very satisfactory, as well as a cheap means of doing 

 the work. 



As is shown by tiie plans, the construction of such a frame is very 

 simple and no particular skill is required to put it together. The top 

 rails are made of four 2 x 3 's, 14 feet long, which are used for the sides, 

 and two pieces 16 feet long at the ends. These rails are notched, as 

 shown, so as to make smooth joints at the corners, and the edges are 

 rounded to prevent tearing the tents. Iron dowels one-half inch in 

 diameter are driven into the posts to hold the rails in place. The posts 

 and supports or bases are made of 2x4's and recpiire for the posts 

 two pieces 16 feet long, and for the bases, two pieces 18 feet long. In 

 case the trees are not tall enough to support the tent in the center, two 

 cross poles 16 feet long may be laid from side to side to hold up the sag. 

 The cost of the lumber amounts to about two dollars and a half and 

 as it takes a man only about two hours to build such a frame the total 

 cost need not exceed four dollars. 



Our object in building a sectional frame was to make it as easy as 

 possible to handle. Two men are needed to operate one of these frames, 

 and the only difficult part of the work is in pulling the tent on to the 

 frame. The tent is unrolled at one end (at A in the drawing), the 

 same as if placed to pull over a tree ; several folds are then lifted to the 

 end rail (D) and with a man working at each side are pulled out along 

 the rails. This operation is repeated until the frame is covered. In 



