76 APPLE GROWING IN CALIFORNIA. 



thing to keep ahead of the various pests and spray before they become 

 too bad, but spraying costs money, so much that it is often done poorly 

 in an attempt to save material, and too much emphasis can not be 

 placed upon the necessity for orchardists acquiring sufficient knowledge 

 of the various pests and diseases, so that they may know when spraying 

 need not be done, or when it must be done in order to best protect the 

 trees or crops. Because of the lack of knowledge in this work many 

 have advocated a certain course of spraying to be given each season 

 regardless of condition of the orchard or its previous record with 

 respect to the pests. There may be sections where such a course can 

 be outlined and followed out to advantage, but orchards differ as do 

 individuals or groups of individuals, and what one requires may be 

 absolutely unnecessary for another, so after all the owner must study 

 his orchard and learn to know for himself what is best for it. 



Failure to control the various pests of the orchard when certain of 

 them are present and when the right kind of an insecticide or fungi- 

 cide is used, is more often due to lack of thoroughness in the applica- 

 tion than to everything else. The writer has heard orchardists, time 

 and again, condemn certain sprays as being poor when they themselves 

 were to blame for the poor results attained. At one time an orchardist 

 had sprayed some young apple trees with Black Leaf "40,"- 1-1000 

 for the control of the green aphis and when he got through the trees 

 were still badly infested. He immediately complained that the material 

 used w r as not good. An investigation of the orchard showed that quite a 

 large percentage of the aphids had been killed but that there were 

 &till enough left so that without further spraying nothing of value 

 would have been accomplished. For the purpose of a demonstration a 

 few trees were re-sprayed with a drenching rather than a light appli- 

 cation. In this case practically one hundred per cent of the lice were 

 killed, proving that the spray was good but that the methods of appli- 

 cation were faulty. When we stop to think that in cases of this kind 

 the time and material is often thrown aw r ay, whereas a little more care 

 and a little greater thoroughness, although it will cost more, will bring 

 results, there is little excuse for hasty, careless work. While it is 

 possibly not a good thing to advocate as a general practice, it is usually 

 better, from a financial standpoint, to spray one half of an orchard 

 very thoroughly than to spray the whole thing for possibly the same 

 cost and slight the work. In the first case a good crop of apples may 

 be harvested from half the orchard, while in the second the loss may 

 be total. 



A few years ago the writer sprayed a part of a very old apple orchard 

 in southern Maryland, which had not received a spray for a long time, 

 and possibly never. The apples for years past had dropped from fung- 

 ous and codling moth attack. In this case probably not over one third 

 of the orchard was sprayed, by the use of a barrel pump and an ox 

 team, but for the first time in years it produced salable fruit which 

 sold for a big price, but only the sprayed trees had good fruit. This 

 was a most striking example of the possibility of protecting even a 

 small part of an orchard by heavy spraying. When negligent orchard 

 owners can be made to see the value of heavy spraying by starting 

 in first on a small portion of the orchard for economy's sake, such work 

 will often lead to the same kind of spraying over large areas. 



