436 MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
it than most people think. I used tarred paper once, but that is the 
worst thing one can use to exclude the air. I can tell you one 
think—he says he protects with boards, but I do not protect with 
anything; I do in one way, and, that is, I give them low branches. 
I do not want the trunk higher than two feet before it branches out. 
When farmers buy trees they want a tree with a nice high trunk, 
they want them so they can run a horse through the orchard. That 
is the worst thing for Minnesota. If a man sends me such trees 
he must either take them back or have a lawsuit on his hands. 
(Laughter.) I do not want to plant a tree older than two years. 
I have some Duchess trees on my place that are some twenty-eight 
years old; they take twenty feet of room on each side, and if you 
want to get the fruit you have got to crawl under, and those trees 
have not a bit of dead wood on them. My other trees are not quite 
as low as that, but wherever there is a tree with a high trunk it is 
sun-scalded. 
Mr. Dartt: I want to correct a statement that the gentleman 
made when he refers to what I said either a year ago or at this 
time; he must have been sleepy. I never in my life objected to the 
manuring of an orchard unless the trees were of a blighting variety ; 
then manuring is likely to increase the evil and make them blight 
worse. At one of those times they sent me down to Iowa I ob- 
served in the reports made that where an orchard had done well it 
was either thoroughly cultivated or well manured, and I have al- 
ways been in favor of cultivating or manuring. I believe that is the 
only way to raise a successful orchard. 
MY SEEDLING ORCHARD. 
J. S. PARKS, PLEASANT MOUNDS. 
I came into the state in 1863, very late in the fall, too late to do any 
planting, and all I did the first season was to take the spade and spade up 
a spot twelve feet square and then plant it with black walnuts and flower 
seeds the next spring. I had a few seeds that my friends had sent me from 
northern New York and Canada, in the neighborhood of the Fameuse and 
Snow apple, towards Quebec. . Next year a neighbor and friend of mine 
was going to Red Wing with a load of wheat with his oxen, and I told him 
if he could get me a few apples to do so. I lived one hundred miles or there- 
abouts from Red Wing. He would be a long time on the road, and I told 
him if he ate all the apples he should save me the seed. He brought me the 
apples, but the only reason he did not eat them was because they were too 
hard. I sowed the seed from those apples he brought me, and that was the 
only seed_I sowed except those I received from New York, but most of those 
I got were seedling apples, as that was the only thing that would stand in 
that vicinity. I had some very nice seedlings. I kept sorting and working 
away with the seedlings and root-grafts I got from my friend Springer. I 
ance sent to Bloomington, IIl., for six thousand root-grafts of the old kinds, 
