28 Director's Report of the 



Station was established has the temperature been so low here as 

 it was in February, 1896, when at one time the mercury regis- 

 tered 21 degrees below zero. All fruit buds of peaches, apricots 

 and sweet cherries were killed; plums, except natives, suffered 

 almost as severely, and sour cherries and pears were damaged 

 to a considerable extent. It was thought that since the winter 

 was unusually destructive to fruit buds throughout the state, 

 and in many cases to the trees as well, this condition afforded an 

 unusually good opportunity for learning the relative hardiness 

 of different varieties of fruit. An effort was made to secure a 

 correspondent in every town in the State to report on the condi- 

 tion of fruit and the amount of winter injury. The names of 

 nearly 700 correspondents were furnished to the Station, 

 and about two-thirds of them responded to the inquiries 

 which were sent to them. From the mass of data which was 

 thus secured, the report on this subject, which is given in the fol- 

 lowing pages, has been compiled. 



A seines of experiments in thinning fruit has been undertaken 

 to study the influence which the practice of thinning fruit, con- 

 tinued systematically for a series of years, may have on the vigor 

 and productiveness of the tree and the size, color and quality of 

 the fruit. By the account of progress of the experiments with 

 apples which is given in this report it is seen that the trees which 

 were thinned in 1896 gave fruit of a higher color and a larger per 

 cent of No. 1 grade than did the trees which were not thinned. 

 The total amount of fruit per tree borne by the former was so 

 much superior in appearance that it is estimated it would usu- 

 ally bring fifteen per cent more in price. 



Plant Disease Investigations. Spraying potatoes. — The ex- 

 periments of 1895 reported in Bulletin No. 101 on spraying po- 

 tatoes with Bordeaux mixture showed three definite results: 



(a) The early blight was largely prevented, and the late blight 

 did not appear at all on the potatoes. The unsprayed vines were 

 badly diseased. 



(6) Spraying five times increased the yield of merchantable 

 tubers sixty-two bushels per acre. 



