THE ALMOND. 43 



Common lime whitewash, soft soap, whale-oil soap, or a 

 thin mineral paint made of pure linseed oil, will answer 

 very well for this purpose if applied often enough to 

 keep the bark constantly coated. 



Of the fungous diseases affecting the almond in this 

 country, very little is as yet known, although we may 

 safely include under this head all those that have been 

 inimical to the peach, for the transition from this tree 

 to the almond would only be a natural sequence. The 

 peach-leaf curl (Taplirina deformans) would not be far 

 from home on the almond leaf, neither could we expect 

 that almond orchards would be wholly exempt from 

 that mysteriously distributed and uncontrollable disease 

 known as " peach yellows." 



In California an almond-leaf blight has already ap- 

 peared and seriously affected the trees in some of the 

 orchards. It is caused by a fungus known as Cercospora 

 circumscissa Sacc. This fungus attacks the leaves and 

 young twigs, causing the former to fall off early in the 

 season, thereby checking the growth of the tree and pre- 

 venting the maturing of the fruit. It is thought that 

 remedies may be applied to check this disease, and there 

 will probably be some form of copper solution employed 

 for destroying it, as with various species of fungi on other 

 kinds of fruit trees. 



