212 MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



While roaming over the orchards of the state last winter, I ob- 

 served that the trees everj where, both plum and apple, were full of 

 fruit buds. If no untimely frost visits us— and we of the North are 

 very exempt from such calamity — we may confidentlj' expect another 

 '92 crop. May I be permitted to urge with greatest emphasis that 

 all who have trees that they value do something to prevent over- 

 bearing and the resultant check to the vitality of the trees, as well 

 as loss of the next season's crop? Clarence Wedge. 



Albert Lea, April 25, '96. 



Apple trees are well filled with fruit buds and the bloom promises 

 to be unusually abundant. Plums and cherries the same. No va- 

 rieties have received injury from the winter. Grape vines that were 

 cut back by the May frost last j^ear did not produce as strong and 

 vigorous fruiting canes as usual, and the prospect is for only about 

 80 per cent, of an average crop. Many strawberry plantations suf- 

 fered severely from summer and autumn drouth and went into 

 winter with feeble roots, but have wintered well and are improving 

 rapidly, and indicate about three-fourths of a full crop. The fruit- 

 ing canes of raspberries and blackberries did not make a heavy 

 growth last year and only about two-thirds of a crop ma^'- be ex- 

 pected. J. S, Harris. 



La Crescent, April 21, '96. 



Apples and plums appear to be perfectly healthy, and prospects 

 for a good crop were never better. Pears (protected) are in perfect 

 condition. Plums, European and Japan, also laid down and covered, 

 are in fine condition — the Japans are in better shape than sonae of 

 the Russians (also protected), the ends of the limbs of the Russians 

 being somewhat injured. Peaches have not come through so well 

 as the plums and pears. Some few strawberries uncovered have 

 stood the winter. Raspberries, Philadelphia and the blackcaps, in 

 good condition. Roses, though well covered, mostly killed. 



Mr. Wedge should charge the "lack of thrift and vigor" of the 

 trees seen here more to the unfavorable weather of the last two years 

 than to the fault of the soil. John R. Cummings. 



Washburn, Minn., April 16, 1896. 



The "Tom Thumb" of the Trees.— The midget of the whole tree 

 family is the Greenland birch. It is a perfect tree in every sense of 

 that term and lives its allotted number of years (from seventy-five 

 to one hundred and thirt}') just as other species of the great birch 

 family- do, although its height under the most favorable conditions 

 seldom exceeds ten inches. Whole bluffs of the east and southeast 

 coast of Greenland are covered with thickets of this diminutive 

 species of woody plant, and in many places where the soil is uncom- 

 monly poor and frozen from eight to ten months of the j'ear, a 

 "forest" of these trees will flourish for half a century without grow- 

 ing to a height exceeding four inches. — Lumber Trade Journal. 



