50 THE LURE OF THE LAND 



ing on a commercial scale. It is easily seen that if 

 everybody should go into fruit growing, the market 

 would soon be overstocked ; not only this, but also over- 

 stocked with a perishable article. For this reason com- 

 mercial fruit growing should be confined especially to 

 the favorable localities which nature has provided and 

 which the experience of man has discovered. On the 

 level prairies of Illinois and Nebraska it would be pos- 

 sible to establish great orchards, where large crops of 

 fruit could be produced; but to use land of this kind, 

 so particularly fitted by nature for the culture of the 

 cereal crops, for the purpose of increasing the fruit 

 supply, would be most unfortunate both from the pro- 

 gressive and the monetary point- of view. This, how- 

 ever, has no bearing at all on the main question, namely, 

 the keeping of a few fruit trees about every farmer's 

 house in the country. 



A TEW FRUIT TREES WELL KEPT. 



To bring about this desirable event, persistent and 

 continuous education and experiment must be used. It 

 is not difficult to get the farmer to plant trees that 

 is easy; the difficult thing is to get him to plant the 

 right kind and to care for them. On the farm my ex- 

 perience has shown me that everything is sacrificed 

 to the standard crops. Even the farmer's garden, 

 where his wife is not able to do all the hoeing, runs to 

 weeds during the season of harvest. To secure a proper 

 orchard, even of a few trees, the farmer must make up 

 his mind that the attention to be given it must be given 

 it promptly. Even if there be no more than twenty-five 

 trees in the orchard, the necessity for pruning and 

 spraying and cultivating and fertilizing is just as great 

 as if there were twenty-five thousand. 



