FARMERS' INSTITUTES. 263 



AN INSTANCE. 



I was talking once with a foreman of an Illinois nursery and I said to 

 him, "How do you know that your stock is pure?" "Why," he said, "we 

 bought it of men that we supposed to be reliable and we calculate it is 

 pure." I asked him how long he had budded from the same stock. He 

 said ever since he had been foreman, for thirty years. For thirty years 

 they have budded trees and labeled them and sent them out. As a mat- 

 ter of fact where everything is in a row, there may not be half a dozen 

 peaches together bearing the same fruit, and there are many varieties 

 in Michigan that nobody knows anything about. The man who buds 

 from bearing stock sees the fruit on the trees. The man who buds from 

 nursery stock will make the buds live better. The man who buds from 

 bearing stock will lose from twenty-five to fifty per cent, as they cannot 

 always distinguish between the fruit bud and the leaf. The only safety is 

 the double fruit bud, they always have a leaf bud in the center. But 

 those buds are not so sure even then as the nursery bud, and I think that 

 fact influences nursery men a great deal. The losses in nursery are much 

 greater if they do that, but the orchard is much safer. I believe that 

 a tree budded from a bearing tree comes to fruit much quicker. I think 

 I have seen plenty of evidence of this, I saw a number of trees budded 

 this last year from bearing trees six years old, and those trees were full 

 of fruit buds in the nursery. That looked to me as though that was a 

 settled fact that it made a difference, I know an orchard of a thousand 

 trees that was budded from trees three to five years old, that bore 75 bas- 

 kets at one year old, I know at the same time of trees budded from nurs- 

 ery stock three and four years old not yet in bearing, 



GETTING THE TREES HOME, 



After selecting trees that are according to your ideas of what they 

 should be, grown on land suitable for growing them, each one firm, hard, 

 and full of vitality, not too large, not too small, the next thing is to get 

 them to your grounds without any injury to the vitality. In my own 

 work I put the trees where I intend to set them in the fall, I do that 

 from choice and heel them at an angle of about 45 degrees and cover 

 with evergreen boughs, I think covering with evergreens is very essen- 

 tial because it prevents a change taking place and evaporating what- 

 ever moisture there may be. The trees will come out vigorous and good 

 in the spring, and are right on the ground where you want to set them, 

 the exposure being very slight. A good many men do not see very much 

 in this, but it is these little things that count. When you see a man who 

 has set one, two or three thousand trees, and tells you he has set them 

 without a loss of a single tree, you may know that that man has been 

 careful of every detail from the nursery to the present day. In setting 

 an orchard of peaches, I should not set closer than twenty or twenty-five 

 feet. On dry soils I would set a little deeper than I have in the past. I 

 have always calculated to set as deep as they come out of the nursery, 

 but wherever I find the trees that have been set deeper, where the stock 



