AN INTERESTING HOUSE MEETING. 



A MEANS OF DEEPENING THE INTEREST OF THE MEMBERS IN THEIR SOCIETY. 

 A GOOD WAY TO SPREAD INFORMATION. 



vN interesting house meeting of the 

 Grimsby Horticultural Society was 

 held on Thursday evening, the 6th of 

 February, at Mr. A. H. Pettit's. In the 

 absence of Mrs. Palmer, the President, and 

 Mr. Burland, the Vice-President, Mr. A. H. 

 Pettit was asked to preside. Two papers 

 were read and discussed, one by Mr. L. 

 Woolverton, on the Garden and Lawn, and 

 one by Mr. J. F. Brennan, on the Cultivation 

 of the Peach Tree. 



The Peach Tree. — Twelve feet apart was 

 advocated as a proper distance apart for 

 planting peach trees, providing they were 

 properly shortened back. This should be 

 done at any time between the harvesting of 

 the fruit, and the month of April following. 

 There is no reason, said Mr. Brennan, why 

 a tree should have a long useless trunk and 

 bare poles of branches, to a height often or 

 fifteen feet from the ground, before you 

 come to the bearing wood. That is just so 

 much waste. From the beginning, prune 

 back your trees so that they must head low 

 down, and throw out fruit spurs along the 

 whole way. You need not cut them back 

 all at once, if they are now too high, but 

 you can renew a part at a time. The proper 

 thing, however, is never to allow them to 

 mature such bare poles of limbs. Trees so 

 trained will live to a greater age than those 

 which grow as they choose, it keeps up the 

 production of fresh, young, growing cells, 

 and the vigor of the tree is maintained 

 almost indefinitely, instead of dying out in 

 ten or fifteen years. Another advantage of 

 my method is that you can employ women 

 pickers. Now, in peach season, men are 



usually scarce, because of the rush of farm 

 work, and, if your trees are high and the 

 fruit so far up that you have to use a twenty 

 or thirty feet ladder to reach them, you 

 must employ men ; but if the fruit can be 

 reached either from the ground or from step 

 ladders, women will do the work. And a 

 good feature of this is that they make better 

 fruit pickers than men ; they seem to know 

 just when a peach is ready ; and they handle 

 it with greater care than men do. 



"I have never pruned my peach trees very 

 much after they are four or five years 

 planted," said Mr. E. J. Woolverton, "up 

 to that time I prune carefully in order to 

 produce a well formed tree ; after that I let 

 them have their own way, simply cutting out 

 dead or useless wood. I believe however 

 the system of shortening is an excellent 

 one." 



Mr. Adolphus Pettit, who grows about 

 the finest peaches about this section said, 

 "I would not plant my trees so close as 

 twelve feet. I do not shorten back my trees, 

 but even if I did, 1 do not think I could 

 keep them so small as to go in a square 

 twelve feet across. I would plant them 

 eighteen or twenty feet apart." 



Mr. J M. Metcalfe plants his trees about 

 seventeen feet apart each way, and counts 

 that quite close enough. 



"I would like to know," said Mr. Ruther- 

 ford, a gentleman from Hamilton recently 

 engaged in fruit farming at Grimsby, 

 "whether it is possible to renew an old tree 

 and get an entirely new top." 



"Yes," said Mr. Adolphus Pettit, "I have 

 had a tree with its limbs broken down with 



