BLIGHT. 223 



Greening and the Wolf River twice the room we give other varieties. 



Mr. Philips (Wis.): They ought to be planted thirty-five feet 

 apart. Mr. Barnes has his sixteen feet, and they are so close a man 

 can hardly get through. 



Mr. Barnes: I would plant the Wolf River about thirty feet each 

 way. 



Mr. Yahnke: Mr. Dartt says manure and high cultivation will in- 

 duce blight. My experience showed me the reverse this year. I 

 manured my orchard very heavily this year and got no blight at all. 

 I manured it the year before, last year and this year. 



Mr. Benjamin: There is an orchard not far from our place where 

 the trees are set on a flat ridge with not more than a foot or fourteen 

 inches of soil above a gravel bed. There is not a sign of blight on 

 those trees; they are Transcendent's and other varieties. I drove 

 around the orchard to see. I have wondered if we had that system 

 of underdraining the soil, if we had the gravel, whether it would not 

 be a benefit. I thought it was very poor land, but I have noticed 

 several orchards in the same condition. 



Mr. Patten (Iowa): Is there time for a few minutes more? I wish 

 to say that in our discussion of this question we are overlooking a 

 valuable and practical point we ought to bring out. The fact is, ac- 

 cording to my experience, it does make a very great difference 

 whether you enrich land with strawy or rank manure as to whether 

 you produce blight in trees, either in orchard or nursery. For a 

 number of years I have had experience with prairie land where 

 there was at one time a straw stack, and for years afterward that 

 land was cultivated to corn, oats and wheat, and different kinds of 

 crops, and this stack had been placed on an elevated ridge of land. 

 If there was any spot in the whole field where it would be supposed 

 trees would not blight, it was on that ridge, and that was the only 

 spot, except one, on the place, in a large block of trees, where any 

 considerable blight developed, and it was very marked in the region 

 about the straw stack. In another case I manured a piece very 

 thickly with barnyard manure, and afterward planted Whitney No. 

 20, and they blighted to death. If we apply our manure in the fall 

 as a top dressing for the orchard, it will not have the same effect, 

 and I am one of the strongest advocates of that method of manur- 

 ing an orchard. In those exposed locations where the circulation 

 of air is cut off, I think many of us have noticed that in such posi- 

 tions the blight on the spurs of the trees is apt to appear about the 

 time they are in blossom or a little later, and it is very much worse 

 than where there is a free circulation of air. As to the matter of re- 

 sisting blight among the different varieties, I think there is a great 

 difference, and I do not think we have considered this question as 

 we ought. I have not the slightest doubt that if every tree of the 

 Transcendent was destroyed, it would be a blessing, and the same 

 thing would be true of the Yellow Transparent. There are other 

 cases, like this of the Northwestern Greening, an apple I introduced, 

 and the Arctic, where you scarcely find any blight. 



Mr. Beckley: I think it would be a very good thing to eradicate 

 all those blighting Transcendents, but what would you do with us? 



