10 Marcu, 1917. J Apple Culture in Victoria. 147 



This variety usually responds so well to good cultural treatment 

 that the trees growing under these conditions are mostly vigorous. 

 When the surplus leaders, previously mentioned, have been thinned 

 out after the trees have commenced to bear, those remaining usually 

 produce a heavy fleece of lateral growths of various strengths annually. 

 The longer and stronger of these should be shorn off at winter pruning, 

 while the shorter and weaker ones may be retained, so that they may 

 build up fruit buds on which they fruit during the succeeding year. 

 But the tree produces the major portion of its crop on the more highly- 

 developed fruit spurs except on the off year of a biennial cropping 

 variety when most of the fruit is produced on the two-year-old laterals. 



Plate 67 shows a fourteen-year-old Pomme de Neige tree photo- 

 graphed before it received its last winter pruning. The small laterals, 

 fruit spurs, and knobs are not so noticeable as they are subsequent 

 to the pruning operation being carried out. 



Plate 68. — Same Tree as in Plate 67, pruned. 



Plate 68 is the same tree pruned. A clearer view is here obtained 

 of the class of l^ght laterals, and spurs retained, and the general prun- 

 ing treatment advocated in respect to this variety. 



Pruning the Irish Peach. 

 The Irish peach has not been so extensively cultivated in Victoria 

 during recent years as formerly. It is one of the old varieties which 

 is gradually losing favour with apple growers, owing chiefly to the 

 introduction of more popular, thrifty, and profitable sorts. It is 

 figured here, not because its cultivation is advocated under existing 

 conditions, but on account of the object lesson in pruning w-hich it 

 illustrates. Like the Rome Beauty a characteristic of this variety is to 

 produce barren growths. But the Rome Beauty gives most of its 

 barren leader wood while under five years of age, although, when 

 older, barrenness sometimes occurs and particularly when long secondary 



