LUTHER BURBANK 
Moreover, there are other thousands who have 
on their farms neglected orchards, run riot with 
weeds and bringing no monetary return whatever, 
which might be made the most productive and val- 
uable portions-of the entire acreage. 
And in each case the grafting of the cions of 
good varieties of fruit on the old and otherwise 
worthless stock is the key to the entire situation. 
OLp Trees Mave YouNG 
We shall have occasion in the successive chap- 
ters of the present volume to examine in detail the 
methods of cultivation and possibilities of im- 
provement of the different orchard fruits. Here 
it may be of service to take a brief general view of 
the subject. And at the outset I wish to emphasize 
the possibility of making over the orchard mate- 
rial which is now in hand, so to speak, and which 
is being so sadly neglected. 
Reports from all over the country tell the same 
story. In Ohio, for example, according to the re- 
port of experts of the Agricultural Station, there 
are thousands of acres of idle orchards. The 
product of apples—the chief orchard fruit—has 
fallen to less than a fourth of what it was a gen- 
eration ago. Apple trees themselves are about 
half as numerous as they were; and this implies 
that those that remain are only half as productive 
as the trees of twenty-five or thirty years ago. 
[40] 
