Page 20 



BETTER FRUIT 



December 



A Telephone Pays — Every Hour 



It pays in MONEY. It pays in PLEASURE. It pays in TIME SAVED. Put in a telephone, 

 and you can talk to your friends' homes in the evening for a social chat, or get the doctor quick, 

 or call for help. You will never feel lonely or "away off" if you have a telephone. In the daytime 

 you can call up the town and find out latest prices for crops, order supplies, ask the railroad about 

 shipments, or talk over matters with neighbors. Why be isolated, cut off from everybody, when a 



Western Electric 



Rural Telephone 



will put you "next door" to everybody, and save long drives through cold and wet. A FEW DOLLARS buys all 

 this convenience. A FEW MINUTES' TIME taken to write us on how to secure good telephone service will 

 put you in possession of full information. Write nearest house below and mention this paper. 



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Manufacturers of the 8,000,000 "Bell" Telephones 



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Salt Lake City 



Pruning for Fruit Every Year 



THE fruit industry of the Pacific 

 Northwest has received another 

 severe shock this year in being 

 unable to satisfactorily market its early 

 varieties of apples. This is again going 

 to cause hundreds of orchardists to 

 neglect their trees and permit their 

 orchards to get in such condition that 

 it will be impossible for years again to 

 I)ro(Iuce large quantities of extra fancy 

 fruit. Conditions of this kind are al- 

 ways unfortunate, but the most serious 

 difTiculfy is that the eft'ect will be very 

 lasting, even to the extent of causing 

 the destruction of some very good 

 orchard properties. 



One of the first, yet very important 

 factors to receive neglect in an orchard 

 is "pruning." Spraying must be done 

 because some of our good state laws 

 say so. Cultivation and irrigation, or 

 irrigation is essential to the life of the 

 tree in certain districts, but no law 

 says you must prune, nor has a tree 

 ever been known to die because of the 

 lack of i)runing, and so foi' this reason 

 I consider pruning a very essential 

 factor for the future good of the 

 orchard. In the past we have heard 

 much about the pruning and training 

 of young trees. We have had differ- 

 ences of opinion as to whether the tree 

 should be headed down to six inches 

 from the ground or thirty inches from 



By Professor W. S. Thornber, Lewiston, Idaho 



the ground, and whether the frame- 

 work should consist of three limbs or 

 more, and even some have gone so far, 

 without considering other factors, as to 

 tell us in just what moon to prime for 

 wood and for fruit. Theoretically this 

 has been fine, because we could defi- 

 nitely plan our work, but practically it 

 has been another story, and so after 

 years of practical experience in the 

 orchard, I want to give you my obser- 

 vations on how to prune for fruit every 

 year. 



First of all, let nie correct any misap- 

 prehensions that might exist along the 

 line that cultivation, irrigation, sjjray- 

 ing, fertilizing or even pruning alone 

 can under even the most favorable con- 

 ditions always produce fruit. No one 

 of these horticultural practices, no mat- 

 ter when done, can make a production 

 of fancy fruit on a tree, if any one of 

 the others is seriously neglected. They 

 are as closely tied togethed as any 

 group of natural laws of the universe. 

 By breaking one you interfere with the 

 working of the others, and so it is in- 

 advisable to consider the pruning of an 

 orchard without faking cognizance of 

 its cultivation in flie ijast and the prob- 

 able cultivation of the future. Long 

 ago horlieidturists recognized flie unify 

 existing among the factors of eidti- 

 vating, spraying, pruning and ferti- 



lizing, and that it was essentially the 

 business of the grower to see that 

 these worked in harmony and that 

 each was given its due consideration, 

 but with the addition of "irrigation," 

 complications have arisen among the 

 factors, and while all arc affected, 

 since I am confined to pruning I will 

 deal with this factor alone. 



Assuming that the tree has reached 

 bearing age and size, and that it al- 

 ready has its fruiting wood, two rather 

 minor factors closely allied to irriga- 

 tion become strongly apparent. These 

 are: (1) Abundance of available fruit- 

 bud food at the proper season of the 

 year. (2) Sufficient moisture during 

 the close of the growing season to per- 

 fect the development of the fruit buds. 

 We have learned that the wrong inter- 

 pretation of these two factors is just 

 as detrimental as the ignoring of either 

 or both. Of course most lands in the 

 Northwest have abundance of plant 

 food, however we occasionally find 

 limited areas that need correction or 

 additional food for the best fruit pro- 

 duction, and strange as it may seem, 

 this correction has in several instances 

 l)een made through a spray, a spray of 

 plant food in dormant trees. The appli- 

 cation of large ciuantifies of complete 

 fertilizers to the soil of the orchard, 

 not infrequently retards and indefi- 



