332 ANNUAL REPORT 



localit}'. They are out on the broad prairie, remote from water, and 

 one hundred miles northwest of the best fruit-growing part of the 

 State; the soil a black prairie loam. Here the Wealthy trees were all 

 killed in 1884-5, and out of thirty Duchess trees planted the same 

 spring with the apple seed (1868), and a good many planted since, only, 

 four or five trees now remain. Now, all of these seedlings being later 

 in season than Duchess, the Peerless keeping in good condition till 

 February, is it not reasonable to conclude that b}^ a proper system of 

 selection trees may be produced that will bear apples of long-keeping 

 qualities ? 



I have now planted in orchard about seventy-five trees of selected 

 Duchess seedlings. I undertook to begin this business in 1873, after 

 the previous winter had swept away nearly everythiag in my locality 

 except the Duchess, That summer I had seen in the orchard of our 

 friend Norman Buck, at Winona, two good bearing trees standing 

 apart from the rest of the orchard; one was the Rawles Jannet, and 

 the other whs Duchess. It occurred to me that here would be a good 

 chance to get a cross combining the irouclad constitution of one par- 

 ent with the flavor and keeping qualities of the other; but the Duch- 

 ess blooms earlier than the other, so, to obviate that difficulty, I made 

 arrangements with Mr. Buck to mulch the Duchess well on the snow, 

 so as to retard its blooming to correspond with the Jannet. I was 

 then to have the crop of Duchess apple seeds, for which I was to pay 

 him $10. He did the mulching, but the hens went up, either while 

 he slept or at some other time, and scratched it away, and our experi- 

 ment failed. 



NEW RUSSIANS. 



My attention was then diverted to New Russian apples, and for 

 awhile expected great things by a shorter cut than seedling apples, 

 not knowing that we were simply repeating an experiment that had 

 been tried in Europe before I was born, repeated iu this country in 

 the first half of the present century, and that as the result of those 

 trials the Duchess had been handed down to us as the best of all. 



Outside of professional nurserymen it is hard to find a single tree of 

 New Russian apples, although hundreds of thousands of them have 

 been sold and planted since 1873 up to 1884. So general was their 

 destruction that out of three hundred and thirty varieties sold our 

 friend Pearce off'ered to give $5 each for every tree that could be found 

 alive in 1886. In my section some of them live, but don't bear fruit. 

 I have a tree fourteen years old on which I have never seen but one 



