294 



THE CANADIAN HORTICULTURIST. 



As a general fertilizer for lawns there is 

 nothing better or cheaper than a top dress- 

 ing of well rotted barnyard manure. Our 

 practice on the lawns at the College is to 

 apply this after the ground freezes hard 'n 

 the fall, or at any time in the winter when 

 the snow is not too deep. The soluble por- 

 tion of the manure is washed into the 

 ground with the melting of the snow and 

 the early spring rains, and stimulates an 

 early and luxuriant growth. When the 

 lawn is dry enough to rake in the spring the 

 coarsest of the manure is raked off. The 

 finer parts are thus worked in around the 

 grass roots. 



BLACK MEDICK. 



Sir, — I enclose a plant growing in our meadows 

 which looks something like Sweet Clover but is much 

 smaller, the bloom is yellow. Is it of any com- 

 mercial value or is it a dangerous weed. We 

 anxiously await reply through the Horticulturist. 



Port Dover. J. E. Anderson. 



Answered by Prof. H. L. Hutt, O. A. C, 

 Guelph : 



The plant in question is Black Medick, 

 sometimes called yellow clover, and botani- 

 cally known as Medicago lupulina. It 

 grows freely in meadows, lawns and waste 

 places, and in none of these cases may it be 

 looked upon as a weed. A weed has aptly 

 been defined as a plant out of place. This 

 plant, or any other, in a strawberry patch, 

 might justly be looked upon as a weed, but 

 on the lawn it forms a thick green mat, and 

 in a pasture field affords good pasture, but 

 it is too short to yield much hay unless sup- 

 ported by other taller growing clovers or 

 grasses. 



A COREECTION. 



EXPERIMENTS IN THINNING FRUIT AT THE 

 AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION, 

 GENEVA, N. Y. 



The comments on the experiments in 

 thinning fruit, which have been conducted 



at the Experiment Station at Geneva, N. Y., 

 published in the June number of the Horti- 

 culturist, do not present correctly the conclu- 

 sions which one must accept after studying 

 these experiments. It is not necessary now 

 to inquire whether I have reported them in- 

 correctly or whether my statements have 

 been incorrectly reported. The important 

 thing is to present the right conclusion to the 

 readers of the Horticulturist. 



The experiments referred to were begun 

 in 1896 and continued for several years 

 thereafter. The object was to include 

 enough trees under experiment so that the 

 work might be conducted as a commercial 

 proposition. The same trees had the fruit 

 thinned year after year, while corresponding 

 trees were left unthinned during the same 

 period. Work was done upon apples, apri- 

 cots, plums and peaches. 



Taking all the experiments into consider- 

 -ation, both with stone fruits and with apples, 

 the effect of thinning was seldom shown to 

 any considerable extent in the character of 

 the yield the following year upon the same 

 trees. In many instances there was appar- 

 ent some permanent advantage as a result of 

 the thinning, but in many other instances 

 no such advantage was apparent. This 

 leads us to conclude that for trees which 

 have reached mature bearing condition, and 

 which are well fed and in all respects well 

 cared for, the effect which thinning the fruit 

 may have upon the productiveness of the 

 tree in succeeamg seasons has not been suffi- 

 ciently great in these experiments to permit 

 us to look for very much profit in that direc- 

 tion from thinning fruit. In this work the 

 profit from thinning fruit, when there has 

 been any, has for the most part come from 

 the superior size and quality of the fruit of 

 the current season. I wish to call particu- 

 lar attention to the qualification made in the 

 previous statement as to the kind of tree 

 under consideration. There can be no 



