INDIANA HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 369 



As I said last evenin.t!:. the successful fruit grower must believe in the 

 Inisiness and be a lover of fruit growing. The modern apple market is 

 going to be largely in the hands of men and women who love apples for 

 their own sake and who like to put nice looking fruit on the market. So the 

 first requisite to succeed in this business is not the land, is not the variety, 

 is not the locality, but the right kind of a man or woman back of the 

 job. It is the right man or the right woman that is back of the business 

 that will make a success. The spirit of good culture, the spirit of honest 

 '*^)acking and marketing must be in the heart of the man or the woman, 

 together with a love for the business and a belief in themselves and their 

 apples. Then comes the soil and the location. If you are free to go 

 where yon will, of conrs(\ there are localities where apples can be grown 

 better th.in in uthers. Hut if you are tied to the old home, to the old 

 surroundings, make the best of the situation. Rolling land, land that is 

 well drained of water and air— and air drainage is .iust as essential to 

 good fruit as watir (b-ainage— should come first in selecting your loca- 

 tion. In a general way I would say, without knowing anything particu- 

 larly about it. tliar your best apple lands in Indiana lie in the rolling 

 land.s (if the sontliern counties of the State, and not in the north, but you 

 can grow good apples in the northern part too. High, well drained, roll- 

 ing land is where the finest apples may be gi'own. The apple will stand 

 land of greater natural fertility than any of our tree fruits, and yet, if I 

 liad my choice I would not care for land in the highest state of fertility; 

 that is. land rich in organic fertility so as to make a greater growth of 

 wood, if lighter land might be secured under equal conditions. 



Then the land must be well plowed and tilled: in fact, I know of no 

 land that can be too well tilled for any crop. Tillage is the great essential 

 t;i<'ti:r in choice production of any of the products of the soil. I had a 

 lesson in that some years ago when I was in California. I visited General 

 Hidwell. whom some of you perhaps voted for for President of the United 

 St.-ites on the Prohibition ticket— and I take this occasion to say that he 

 is (^e of the greatest men who have lived in America. He has in the 

 Sacramento Valley one of those gi-eat valley farms, rich, black, fertile 

 soil, and there he grows the vines and the figs and the apricots and the 

 ajjples liy the thousands of acres, and wheat bj^ the tens of thousands of 

 acres. Doing business on so large a scale he, of course, has the modern 

 implements. He puts in his wheat at a rapid rate, and does it about as 

 well as tJK^ average wheat grower in America. His farm has 40,000 acres, 

 a I'd ad.jiMiiing him is a farm of 500 acres owned by a woman. She did 

 not liave all the modern implements as he had them on his farm, nor did 

 she have the money to get them; but with a couple of good mule teams 

 the land was plowed, then let fallow a couple of months and cross plowed. 

 Then the harrows went over it and tore it up, and then went over it 

 again. Then tlie seed was brushed in. General Bidwell, who got nomi- 

 nated for the Presidency, got on an average fifteen bushels of wheat to 



24— Board of A. 



