FIFTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK — PART VI. 497 



weather frequently in March and April which started premature growth in 

 unripe trees that were followed by very cold weather, which injured their 

 cambium layers and caused sun-scald on their southwest sides. 



I lost most of the one thousand four hundred apple trees which I planted 

 in 1869 and 1870, before they were old enough to bear full crops of fruit 

 because they could not obtain as much water from the soil as was necessary 

 in very dry summers to enable them to complete their growth and ripen at 

 the proper time in the fall. Frequently their leaves were killed by frosts 

 when they were young, and I will now offer facts to prove why many of our 

 fruit trees have been tender and unprofitable. 



On the 20th day of March, 1879, I examined the different kind of trees 

 in my orchard carefully with a knife, and I found that all of them were in 

 excellent condition. But from the 21st to the 28th day of March the weather 

 was very warm; on the 29th of March it was very cold and the ground was 

 frozen to the depth of two inches. Then there was a sudden change in the 

 weather, which was very warm for several days. On the 10th day of April 

 I examined my trees again, and found that many of the American apple 

 trees had made more or less premature growth; that the bark of many of 

 them was easily separated from the wood, and that their cambium layers 

 were full of slimy, liquid matter. By the middle of May it was very evident 

 that from one-fourth to one-half of the bark on the southwest sides of the 

 injured trees was dead, and that all of the American varieties were injured 

 more or less, except one row of twenty-eight Fameuse trees, which I had 

 manured heavily with stable manure 1872, 1874 and 1876, and this 

 row was mulched heavily in 1878 with spoiled clover hay. But the bark 

 on the bodies of the trees in three other rows of Fameuse trees, around 

 which no manure had ever been used, were sun-scalded severely. When 

 trees were slightly injured by sun-scald, their wounds were attacked after- 

 ward by flat-headed borers, which destroyed the bark around them 

 rapidly until many of the trees were fatally injured. In this orchard about 

 two hundred of the following Russian apple trees and some crab trees were 

 not injured, viz: Duchess, Tetofsky, Alexander and the Hyslop, Montreal 

 Beauty and Transcendent crabs. 



In 1870 I planted thirty-two Wealthy apple trees around a well which was 

 thirty-two feet deep and walled with rock. In 1879 all of these Wealthy 

 apple trees were fatally injured by sun-scald, except one tree, which stood 

 less than four feet from the well. It is a large and healthy tree now, 

 because it obtained all of the water that it needed from the wall of the well, 

 and it never failed to ripen in the fall after the dryest summers. In 1890 I 

 grubbed out fifty- two large Haas apple trees twenty-one years old, which 

 had been injured by sun-scald, and all of them had never produced more 

 than ten bushels of salable apples, while on good orchard sites only a few 

 miles away large Haas trees were healthy and profitable. In my orchard 

 the Northern Spy suffered from sun-scald and it was not fruitful, while 

 about sixty trees of this variety in another orchard in Black Hawk county, 

 where it was only from eight to twelve feet down to a ledge of badly broken 

 limestone and only from twenty to twenty-six feet above the water level, 

 were very healthy and profitable for many years. And again, I have an 

 eight-acre W^ealthy orchard which was planted in 1889, where there had been 



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