COMMERCIAL ORCHARDS FOR THE NORTHWEST. 245 



much money for them as if you had only the one kind. They tell 

 me that in order that a man may make a success of a commercial 

 ■orchard he should have at least one carload of a given variety of 

 fruit ; then instead of peddling your apples in an interior town, if 

 you have a carload of fruit a buyer will come to your orchard and 

 pick the fruit and pay you nearly again as much as you can get 

 peddling it out. In order to be able to sell your fruit and get a good 

 price commercially you must have enough of a given variety of fruit 

 to make it an object for the buyer to come to your place. 



How much should the orchard pay you? The Wealthy apple 

 will begin to bear after it has been planted six or seven years. I 

 believe it is a fair estimate to say that with one hundred and twenty- 

 live trees to the acre your Wealthy will pay you one dollar per tree 

 per year; consequently, after they are nine years old — say you 

 planted 125 trees to the acre and allowing twenty-five trees to die or 

 kill out, leaving you one hundred trees to the acre — they will give 

 you an income of $100 to the acre for every acre of Wealthy you 

 plant. It may not be every year, but it will average that. I believe 

 that is a fair, conservative estimate of the money represented in a 

 good orchard of Wealthy trees. 



Xow, outside all of this experimental work that has been done 

 I would be trying to get on the commercial side of this thing. It 

 will pay you to go home and study it over. Look around your 

 neighborhood and find a suitable site. You can do nothing better 

 for your boy than to plant an orchard for him, if you live inside this 

 belt I have spoken of, and you will not regret it. 



Mr. Carl Vollenweider : When a young man talks about plant- 

 ing out a big orchard in whatever locality he may live in Minnesota, 

 most people laugh at him and say he has too much in his head, that 

 apples have been tried for the last fifteen to tweny-five years, and- 

 nobody has made any money out of them. I have studied that ques- 

 tion for the last five or six years, and I endorse everything that Mr. 

 Trigg has said, and I would like to find out what most of the horti- 

 culturists here present think about it. I would like to know whether 

 they believe that in the southeastern part of the state a young rnan 

 can make a success of orcharding by planting Wealthy trees, taking 

 care of them as Mr. Trigg suggested, and whether, if he goes to 

 work and puts out two hundred acres of Wealthy trees, invests $50 

 an acre in his land and buys the trees, he is going to get a return 

 for his money equal to five or six per cent interest or more on the 

 money invested. I would like to have all those men who think^ it 

 would be a profitable investment in southeastern Minnesota raise 

 their hands. (A few hands were raised.) There are not very many. 



Mr. C. L. Blair: I have been for quite a number of years trying 

 to grow a commercial orchard in a small way. While I would not 

 ■condemn what Mr. Trigg has said, I believe by substituting the 

 Peerless for the Wealthy" it would be a grand improvement. The 



