GENERAL FRUITS. 233 
Home grown grapes for Christmas and New Year’s are not to be de- 
spised, and are clearly within the reach of every one who has a warm, 
sunny place in which to set his vines. 
A demand is springing up among the farmers for evergreens for wind 
breaks. It is an auspicious omen. If carefully and honestly met and 
fostered it means shelter, warmthand beauty about multitudes of homes. 
It is strange that the nakedness of our dreary winter landscape should so 
long have gone unclothed, when the whole verdure of the pine and spruce 
lay as well within our reach as did their mighty trunks. But the day we 
trust is coming when the resinous odor, the cones and needles, and the 
towering walls of green, shall be about the homestead of every Minnesota 
farmer. 
REPORT ON: GENERAL FRUITS. 
F. H,. FIEDLLER, FERGUS FALLS. 
Myr. President and Members of the State Horticultural Society : 
Cl am very often asked the question, ‘‘Why do people up in your country 
not make more efforts to grow fruit?” ae 
In this, my jreport as'member of the general fruit committee, I will 
also make it an object to answer all such questions in as brief a manner 
as possible, to do the subject justice. 
Some twenty-five years ago this portion of Minnesota was a vast wilder- 
ness, inhabited by roaming bands of Indians, semi-barbaric to savage in 
their habits, who subsisted on the abundance of fishes in the lakes and 
rivers; who chased the deer, elk and moose through the then seeming in- 
exhaustable forests, and over rolling prairies. No houses, fields and towns! 
No sign of civilization! One vast wilderness! For centuries it was thus, 
until the hardy pioneers, the forerunners of civilization, found their 
way to this park region of Minnesota, and made their homes, amidst 
almost indescribable hardships; changed the prairies and timber open- 
ings to farms of great fertility, fitted to take the first rank among the 
agricultural countries of the world. 
Soon after the sturdy pioneers were about settled down and had some 
patches cleared for fields, the first tree peddler made his appearance, 
with a bounteous plate book and a museum of monstrosities preserved in 
alcohol, selling northern grownnursery stock raised in Indiana and Ohio. 
Everybody was eager to raise fruit, and the oily-tongued stranger 
asserted it was easy to grow not only apples and pears in this dry, healthy 
climate, but also peaches of long keeping quality, such as cannot be 
grown in the peach districts further south, not mentioning the numerous 
varieties of smaller and unimportant fruit. Well, to make a long story 
short, this public benefactor and promoter of horticulture (?) had no 
trouble in getting large orders for stock everywhere he came. 
In due time the trees arrived, were carefully planted, grew well until 
fall, some even grew again the next year, and a few were four or five 
years old when they died, but soon the last trace of all of them was gone. 
