270 NEBRASKA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



who is an experienced orchardist, Mr. Donovan asked Mr. R. O. Kellar of 

 the "Davey gang" to inspect his orchard trees and report their condition, 

 and whether there were any hopes of saving these trees by the Davey way. 



Mr. Kellar's report was accepted, and he and his associates, T. M. and 

 J. C. Loiry and W. J. Auwood of the Davey Tree Expert Co. were in- 

 structed to make the necessary repairs to some of the most seriously 

 wounded of these trees in Mr. Donovan's orchard. 



CLEAN OUT THE CAVITIES. 



Fruit-Grower readers are familiar with the usual processes of rejuve- 

 nating old orchards by pruning, spraying and cultivating, but the Davey 

 process is something different. This work consists essentially in cleaning 

 out the rotten cavities and filling them with cement. Now this sounds 

 like a simple thing. It is simple, but like many other extremely simple 

 operations, it takes a high degree of skill to do it with utmost success. 

 Many of us have tried filling holes in trees with cement. I remember very 

 well the first attempt I made at such work. It was done when I was a 

 youngster. I filled a decaying cavity in an old Transcendant crab apple 

 tree with cement, but the effort would have done the tree more good if it 

 had been applied to a nearby fence post. But I did not do my work in 

 the Davey way. I neglected, or rather overlooked the first essential. I 

 failed to clean out the decaying wood within the cavity, and then sterilize 

 the interior so as to kill all of the germs and fungi. That is the founda- 

 tion of success, and in these trees in Mr. Donovan's orchard, I had op- 

 portunity of observing the care with which experts in this work cleaned 

 out and sterilized the rotten places. 



Most of these trees had split at the fork where the head of the tree 

 branched out from the trunk. On but few of the trees ^was there any evi- 

 dence of internal decay, to the inexperienced eye, but when the "Davey 

 gang" opened up these wounds it was found that the heart of most of 

 these split forks was a mass of decaying wood, burrowed through and 

 through by ants and other insects. 



Opening these wounds was done with chisels. The sides of the crack 

 were cut out, and the split followed down as far as necessary, sometimes 

 to the surface of the ground. The opening was made wide enough to al- 

 low the entire heart of the tree to be chipped out with the chisels, and 

 sometimes the decay had to be dug out of the main roots, and even up 

 into the branches. When this was done, three or four heavy bolts were 

 put through the trunk in a criss-cross manner, and drawn up tight, but 

 not so tight as to draw the spilt together. Then hardwood wedges were 

 driven into the split just between the bolts. These wedges were driven 

 in just as tightly as possible, for the purpose of increasing the tension on 

 the bolts and avoiding any possibility of a strain that would subsequently 

 break the wood away from the cement filling. 



