52 MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



ENCOURAGING WORDS FROM MANITOBA. 



THOS FRANKLAND, STONEWALI,, MANITOBA. 



With the purpose of being of service to doubting and discouraged 

 fruit growers in the Northwest, permit me to tell of early struggles 

 and discouragements happily followed by partial success, the out- 

 come of sixteen years experimental apple culture in Manitoba. 



Searching for light: In 1886, so far as I know, only one man in 

 Manitoba (the late W. B. Hall, of Headingly) had made any very 

 extensive experiments in growing apples. He bought 150 apple and 

 crab trees from Stewart, of Minneapolis. He says they gradually 

 died out after bearing one or two crops, and he became discouraged. 

 Mr. Gibb, of Abbotsford, Quebec, Prof. Budd's companion in Rus- 

 sia, writes in a letter, 28th Sept., 1886, "Remember that your winter 

 temperature is seven degrees lower than the coldest profitable 

 orchard region of the old world." E. H. S. Dartt, of Owatonna, ad- 

 vised me to go slow unless I had lots of this world's goods. In 

 1888, Dr. Saunders, director of Canadian Experiment Farm, said 

 "the experiments thus far undertaken with the standard large fruits 

 cultivate'd in Ontario have been very discouraging. All the trees 

 I have seen tested — even hardy varieties, such as the Duchess, freeze 

 down every year to the snow line, and as there appears to be no 

 wild crabs in Manitoba there are no native stocks which will 

 stand the climate on which to graft." Other correspondents in 

 Minnesota and Iowa wrote giving very little encouragement. Not- 

 withstanding all which the fact that an odd apple tree here and there 

 had grown to bearing size, and the flattering hope of the Russian 

 and Northwestern seedlings held further inducements for further 

 trial on the principle — and that alone — that trees from a like climate 

 and raised in an intercontinental climate were likeliest to succeed. 



Early orders: In the fall of 1886 I ordered from A. W. Sias 

 a bundle of apple trees and buried them for the winter. Spring of 

 1887 Peter M. Gideon added to these. On the 26th July I had 

 fifty-one named apple and crab trees besides fifty of Gideon's un- 

 named. This year twenty trees of the fifty-one are living and have 

 for several years borne fruit. They are of following varieties : 

 October, Martha, Beecher's Sweet, Whitney No. 20, Cherry Red, 

 Lieby, Russian Green, Hibernal, Red Anis, Koursk Anis, Yellow 

 Anis, Romna. Of the fifty unnamed Gideon seedlings about forty 

 survive. Some have been top-worked with other varieties, and 

 twenty-five have for several years borne, hybrids and crabs that 

 compete favorably with any in the market and furnish a better 

 quality of apple sauce than the imported article. Only one so far 



