428 ANNUAL REPORT 



maturity. Not only is the windbreak necessary to keep the fruit 

 from blowing off but it is a protection to the tree itself. Any 

 person by looking over my orchard could convince himself of 

 that fact. The trees near the windbreaks are sound and healthy 

 and bear fruit almost every year, while those in the centre are 

 either dead or are on the decline. I have no one in my mind 

 who has raised apples successfully without a protection. 



I think but little of the theory of some men of having a free 

 circulation of air for fear of a scald. I think these men have 

 never raised many apples in Minnesota, unless they tied them, 

 on with a rag. The tree might grow but it would never hold 

 the apples long enough to ripen them. 



My trees never have been scalded in that way though they 

 have been scalded when the mercury ran as low as thirty or 

 forty degrees below zero for two or three weeks at a time, with 

 the wind in the north till the sap cells became ruptured and 

 closed by the drying wind. While there is vitality enough in 

 the trees to put out foliage in the spring, when the season comes 

 for making what I call the second growth, the sap can go so far 

 and no further, in consequence of the pores of the wood being 

 closed and the vitality so near reduced, and hence when the sap 

 can not circulate that part of the tree must perish. But trees 

 on my grounds close to a protection are not as likely to scale 

 as when isolated. 



EEPOET FEOM EICE COUNTY. 

 By Seth H. Kenney, Morristown. 



After a thirty years' residence in Minnesota and a good many 

 years a member of this Society, we cherish a very kindly feeling 

 toward its old members who have labored so hard to grow ap- 

 ples in this state. There is a sympathetic feeling begotten by 

 meeting them annually and listening to their experience. We 

 all reverence those early pioneers. \ 



In looking at the labor of the nurseryman from a farmer's 

 standpoint, we can not fail to admire this spirit of sacrifice, this 

 untiring devotion that lingers with these men to the last hours 

 of life. The best epitaph I could write on their record would 

 be, "Euling passion strong in death." Twenty-five years of 

 orcharding in Minnesota makes the above words come home 

 with peculiar force. If I take my own orchard of seven acres, and 



