EXPERIMENT STATION REPORT. 629 



THE LIME AND SULPHUR WASHES. 



Nothing is more disappointing than to t5nd that after a series 

 of apparently conclusive trials some unforeseen and unrecognized 

 factor has come in to upset or confuse, or destroy confidence. 



Nothing seemed better established by the results of work 

 done and experiments made by practical fruit growers, horticul- 

 turists and entomologists than that the lime, salt and sulphur 

 mixture, properly made and applied, was an almost complete 

 remedy for the scak. Everybody seemed tO' be able to report 

 success, no matter what the combinat.ioii, nor how it was pre- 

 pared, so that only it reached the insects. There ^vas almost 

 universal regret that we had not known it all before, and a thinly 

 veiled suggestion that those who^ reported failure when first the 

 w'ashes were tried in the East, knew very little about their 

 business. 



And yet failure is the almost universal report that has come 

 as the result of applications made in New Jersey during the 

 winter of 1903-04; failure unexplained and unexpected, and all 

 the more discouraging therefor. To be sure, the failures were 

 not equally bad, nor unrelieved by occasional success : but these 

 dififerences in result bring out a curious difference in the action 

 of the washes on different trees. All successes were with peach 

 and, plum,; and tO' their credit stand all the satisfactory applica- 

 tions that were made. The failures are in apples almost univer- 

 sally, and in pear generally. And those that failed were not 

 novices, nor ignorant, careless farm hands ; they were of the 

 very best of our horticulturists, and the most experienced in 

 dealing with both scale and wash. One large apple grower, 

 who in early 1903 had congratulated himself that at last he had 

 the insect under definite control, when questioned by a fellow 

 sufiferer in the summer of 1904, admitted that "for the last ten 

 years I have had the scale, now the scale has me !" and that, in 

 spite of a more thorough and faithful application of the boiled 

 wash than was ever made before. 



Another, among the first to^ proclaim the success of the wash 

 under New Jerse}^ conditions and who had, himself, started 

 hundreds of growers tO' using it. admitted to me after mid- 

 summer that his orchard was then scaly as never before; that 

 some trees showed dying branches and that others would need 

 prompt attention to save them from the most serious injury. 



In the Ijelief that results were sufficiently positive to be reliable 

 I statted a farm to farm visitation in parts of Mercer and Mon- 



