= “suggest in ‘your dhikers 
; been absent from home Mi train f | 
in several counties, which gave him the best opportunity of collec 
mation as would be of interest to your society. akira 0-d 
you on fruit culture, and having no time to find a more z 
for him, I have to comply with his wishes on this short noti 
been closely at home the whole year and have paid but littl 
matter, therefore please excuse me for the meagre and ed : 
important subject. Speaking in general I cannot report any pri 
horticulture in this part of the state, say west of the Minnesota 
various causes for this deplorable fact. Great many farmers 
in planting anything but wheat, oats and corn, while others 
raise fruit are entirely discouraged by those innumerable dra 
presume are always to be found in a new country. During the 1 
years grasshoppers, rabbits and other vermin have been the cause’ 
tion of many nicely growing orchards and where people succeeded 
them, trees were injured by blight and other diseases, so with all 
and expense farmers have but little to show in the line of 
Le Sueur county where they had no grasshoppers thing 3 
little more prosperous. They have 7 not been troubled 
by the blight, as we have on this side of the river. Speaking of my 
on my own place and the immediate neighborhood where more for the px 
of fruit culture has been done than in any other part of the county, I can 
say but little that is’encouraging. I lost last summer a great number of my old 
transcendents, in consequence of yearly attacks of blight, by which they suffered 
the most in the summer of 1876. In the year of 1877 all those that finally died - 
last summer, showed a sickly appearance. The leaves being of a yellow 
ish color. Blight appeared again among my trees last summer, but to no ‘such 
an extent. Many of my Soulards and old cherry trees also died, haying been 
injured in the winter of 1877 by the unusual warm weather, followed by hard 
frosts. All of the latter were over fifteen years old. Looking around in my_ 
neighborhood I find more or less the same discouraging aspects. At Mr. Miner’s 
place I noticed that his seedling crabs which have yielded him from five to twenty 
bushels to a tree of miserable little apples, with the exception of the Duchess, but 
even they have commenced decaying in several places. Looking at those beau- 
tiful apples raised on Mr. Carpenter’s place, and exhibited at the State Fair, for 
which the first premium was awarded to him, most any person having no knowl- 
edge of the condition of the trees on which they have grown, would feel encour- 
aged aad hopeful for the prospect of fruit growing in our State, but those very 
trees I found decaying. The only thrifty orchard in this part of the county 1s 
that of Mr: Lambert, situated on the second bluff west of St. Peter, on a north- 
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