PICKING AND MARKETING FRUIT. 181 



have apples that will average forty per cent of number ones and thirty- 

 five per cent of number twos, the buyers will hunt you up; and you 

 will have no trouble in selling your apples at a price that will pay better 

 than you can do to market them yourself. This w£is my method last 

 year and before I was done picking, a buyer came to my place and made 

 me an offer of $1.50 per barrel for Jonathans and $1.00 for York Im- 

 perial, and 75c for Ben Davis and other varieties, the packer to furnish 

 the barrels on the ground, and also furnish all his help and board same 

 at his expense, taking all my hands at $1.50 per day and taking all the 

 apples that were fit for market, which was about eighty-five per cent of 

 them. I hauled the apples to the depot two miles distant. Now, it did 

 not take me long to tell him that he had bought my apples at his own 

 price. 



As a rule you will find where the grower takes care of his orchard 

 and raises good apples, he will have no trouble to find buyers and will 

 get all his apples are worth, provided he keeps posted on the market, so 

 as to know what price to hold them at. Now a word for the majority of 

 the growers, to the man who writes those nice little articles for the fruit 

 journals, telling how he turned the sheep in his orchard, and how nice 

 they cleaned out all the weeds and grass, and what a nice little job it was 

 to put a strip of screen wire around each tree to keep the sheep from 

 peeling the trees. And how much better job they do than can be done 

 with a sprayer; as they are supposed to eat all the wormy apples as they 

 fall from the trees, at the same time capturing the worm so he could not 

 climb the tree again and continue his work of destruction. This kind of 

 treatment is a failure; yet three-fourths of the growers are ready to take 

 up with just such ideas. For those fellows I have little sympathy and 

 no advice to offer as to how they should market their apples. 



In conclusion, will say in my opinion, there is only one way to make 

 a success of growing apples that are fit for the market. The orchard 

 should be pruned annually, and thoroughly cultivated. No crop of any 

 kind on the ground. Spray as often as necessary, not less than five or six 

 times and sometimes more owing to the season on account of the rain. 

 Do with your orchard as you would your cornfield when you expect to 

 get a good large crop of corn. In this way, you will have a paying crop 

 of apples every year, and at the same time, the dealers all over the 

 country know what you are doing with your orchard and will be ready 

 to take them off your hands as soon as they are picked, and at your own 

 price too. I have a neighbor that has partly followed these instructions 

 and has had six paying crops in the last six years. The trees are sixteen 

 years old now, and on fifteen acres last year he had five car loads that 

 would average from sixty to seventy-five per cent number ones. 



DISCUSSION. 



Mr. Swan: I would like to ask Mr. Murphy if he generally cares for 

 his apple trees till they are twenty or thirty years old. 



Mr. Murphy: Part of my orchard I have cultivated nearly all the time 



