STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 151 



THE "BLEEDING" OF APPLE TREEiS. 



By T. H. HosKiNs, M. D., Newport, Vt. 



A recent writer says he has trimmed apple trees every month in the year, and 

 has come to the conclusion that from May 25lh to June 25th is the best time, 

 because a wound made in the full flow of the sap will begin to heal immediately. He 

 adds thatM:irch and April are the two poorest months to prune, because there will 

 be a liquid "forming" (query, flowing?) out of the wound, which will kill the bark 

 underneath the limb. Another writer insists that March is the best of all months 

 to prune, because the sap is not then in motion, and the wound will dry before the 

 sap starts, and that then the process of healing will go on most favorably, while 

 anything but very light pruning in June will greatly weaken and sometimes kill the 

 trees. Still another writer says, shortly and emphatically, "Prune when your Knife 

 is sharp," without regard to season. All these writers are orchardists of experi- 

 ence. Is there, then, no proper time to prune, or no way of intelligently reconcil- 

 ing the seemingly contradictory views of these practical men? 



WHY APPLE TREES BLEED. 



A widening accumulation of facts does, in all disputed questions, tend towards 

 the reconcilation of conflicting opinions. In the thirteen years that I lived in Ken- 

 tucky I never saw an apple tree "bleed," that is to say, 1 never saw a flow of 

 disorganized and blackening sap from the slump of a severed limb. In the flrst 

 years of my orchardiiig in Northern Vermont, this so called bleeding exhibited 

 itself in nearly every case where a limb of any size was removed, no matter at what 

 season the operation was performed. It was the most discouraging of my experi- 

 ences at that time, and I could not understand it, or find a remedy for it. 



About fifteen years ago, at a sesSiOn of our State Board of Agriculture in the 

 Champlain Valley, where this question of pruning and subsequent bleeding was 

 discussed by many orchardists of that orchard country, one of the speakers dropped 

 the casual remark that he had never known an apple tree that was not "black- 

 hearted" to bleed, no matter at what season it was pruned. That thought was 

 much more fruitful to me than my orchard had been up to that time, for all my 

 trees were black-hearted, except the Siberians and Russians, which I at once re- 

 membered never bled, no matter when they were pruned. And at the same time I 

 remembered that apple trees are never black-hearted in Kentucky. 



THE CAUSE OP BLACK-HEARTEDNESS. 



The state of black-heartedness in the apple tree is unquestionably the result of 

 excessive winter's cold. In New England a large proportion of the most popular 

 apples are grown upon trees that are more or less black hearted. The Baldwin is 

 always black-hearted in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, and frequently so 

 in the three southern New England States. Along its northern limit it can only 

 be grown when top-grafted on some hardier stock. With me a Baldwin tree or 

 graft has never lived long enough to bear an apple. 



Now; if it be true that only black-hearted trees bleed, then the experience of 

 orchardists must vary according to whether they are growing more tender or more 

 hardy sorts. When 1 began, though 1 planted the hardiest known of New England 



