380 MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



SOLID COMFORT IN A MINNESOTA ORCHARD. 



CLARENCE WEDGE, ALBERT LEA. 



Those who have from their childhood enjoyed to the full the pro- 

 ducts of the best fruit regions of this or other lands can have little 

 appreciation of the value in home comfort of a good orchard. To 

 such and to the few monstrosities who were born without that 

 natural craving for fruit which seems to descend to all Eve's sons 

 and daughters, we have nothing to say in this paper. We believe, 

 however, that but few of either of these classes find their way into 

 our society and that most of you can sympathize with the feelings, 

 appetites and ambitions of one who came to our state as a"small boy" 

 away back in the fifties and will, perhaps, pardon the recital of a 

 little personal history that will go far to explain the enthusiasm that 

 year after year inflicts so much of orcharding upon your patient 

 hearing. 



Having stated that your "small boy" was one of the emigrants of 

 1859, it will be unnecessary to add that he came of "poor but honest" 

 parentage] not that any of us felt poor, but it was before the days of 

 plutocrats hereabouts, and those well supplied with worldly goods 

 very wisely chose to stay where they could enjoy them to the best 

 advantage. But if we were not rich we had an abundance of all that 

 the healthy boy cared for, with one exception, there was an almost 

 complete dearth of fruit. And there were the best of reasons for that 

 dearth. It was before fruit in all its forms had become commercial, 

 as we see it today, and, even had it been, a hundred miles of teaming 

 over the most rudimentary roads lay between us and the nearest 

 artery of commerce, the Mississippi river. Well do I remember the 

 makeshifts resorted to by the good wives and mothers to give their 

 families a taste of something like fruit. The wild crab was held in 

 considerable repute, also the wild grape, and long and tedious quests 

 were made after that queen of delicacies, the wild strawberry. You 

 would scarcely think it now, but my dignified mother who lives in 

 the midst of electric lights, city water and a table supplied with many 

 of the choicest tropical fruits, in those days rode five miles in a 

 lumber wagon to spend the day gathering wild gooseberries on 

 "The Island"; and in memorj' I can see her now returning, well torn 

 both in flesh and clothing, but with triumph in her face as she dis- 

 played a tin pail full of prickly berries to put down for winter sauce 

 for her family. It is about this time that I distinctly remember an 

 older boy who had lately come from Vermont astonishing me with 

 the story that away back in that state the boys used to pelt each 

 other with apples, as we Minnesota boys sometimes did with snow- 

 balls. Apples so plenty as that! It was like the story of the cave 

 full of gold and diamonds that I read of in the Arabian Nights. 



From the midst of such a frontier life as this, it was my happy fate 

 to be sent on a visit of one year to my grandparents, living on a good 

 old fashioned eastern farm. Little did my kind parents know as 

 they saw me leaving with my aunt how much of the poetry of my 

 life would be crowded into that delightful year. Many important 

 events that have come into my life since then are tangled and con- 



