STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 387 



says he found fine ones there in the woods. Top-graft the Chickasaws 

 on the branches of the free-growing, hardy Northern plums. Get the 

 "sand plums" and " sand cherries " from the West, and plant all 

 near together, all mixed up. The Newman and perhaps Mariana 

 seem to be the hardiest of the Chickasaws; they and possibly the Rob- 

 inson, and I think the Miner, should be grafted in the branches of 

 Rollingstone and Weaver. 



THE CURCULIS. 



Do not fear the plum curculio (Conotiachelus neumphar), tor this 

 insect has no practical effect on the fruit crop of these plums whatev- 

 er. The twenty years of my experience with them shows this con- 

 clusively, and I will give it to you in a few words. This insect seems 

 to prefer these plums as a food plant, and to lay her eggs in its fruits 

 above all other plants, for the very good reason that they have through 

 all time been her natural food plant. By most careful study I have 

 found the facts as follows: (1) The plum curculio seeks the native 

 plums the first warm days of spring for food, and reaches them gen- 

 erally before they bloom. (2) The curculio can at that time be very 

 generally destroyed by spraying the trees just before the blossoms 

 open and a week later they have fallen with the arsenical poisons, 

 Paris green and London purple, as the insect is at that time feeding 

 freely on the young growth of the tree. I give this plan, not to pro- 

 tect the plums, but as a means of a general destruction of this most 

 injurious insect to other fruits. I have found no necessity for pro- 

 tecting any of these plums from the curculio. (3) If the curculio is 

 even so plenty as to lay from one to twenty eggs in every plum, my 

 experience has been that if the plums have been fully fertilized the 

 trees will mature a full crop of marketable and useful fruit. (4) For 

 but very few of her eggs laid in these plums hatch, and still fewer of 

 her young, or larvge, reach maturity. My estimates here, during four 

 years of careful observation, proves that it takes more than 3,000 

 eggs laid in any of the over 3,000 varieties of native plums in fruit on 

 my place, to produce one well matured curculio grub, except in the 

 variety known as Wild Goose; and even in it not near enough ma- 

 ture to keep up the species, not more than one grub to each six hun- 

 dred eggs laid. Therefore, as each curculio averages only one hun- 

 dred eggs, then even if confined to this plum for breeding purposes 

 the insect would eventually disappear. All of this is fully proven by 

 experience with me. For, since my first great crop five years ago, 

 nearly every plum which showed from one to twenty ovipositing 



