Pip Fruits: Apples 75 



Alling'ton Pippin. A fine variety of the Cox's Orange Pippin breed, 

 in season from November to February. The fruit varies from medium 

 to large, roundish conical in shape, yellowish streaked with red. It is. 

 a heavy cropper on good soil, the only argument against it being that 

 it is apt to become too large for a dessert fruit. 



7. INSECT PESTS 



A considerable part of the expenses incurred in the maintenance of 

 the plantation will be those incident to the combating of insect and fungoid 

 pests. Judging by the number of specifics that have quite recently come 

 upon the market, and the prodigality with which money is spent on 

 advertising them, one is driven to the conclusion, either that nature has 

 all of a sudden adopted many new inventions in the pest line, or that some 

 keen commercial men have discovered in fruit growers a source of income 

 ripe for tapping, One can find many growers, hale and hearty, who say 

 that in their younger days spraying and spray fluids were all unknown, 

 and, blissfully ignorant of such worries, and their bill files unburdened by 

 their charges, they obtained better crops of fruit than we do now. It may 

 be so; one knows that it is the multiplication of hosts that gives opportunity 

 to an epidemic, and perhaps it is the great increase in the number of fruit 

 trees in cultivation which has given opportunity for such a multiplication 

 of the various organisms, fungoid and insect, that live upon them, as to 

 make it a matter of necessity for the grower of to-day to call in the aid 

 of the chemist and engineer to put into his hands weapons with which 

 to check their ravages. There is this to be said, that in tha indiscrimi- 

 nate slaughter of all things living on the trees with toxic sprays, the 

 innocent suffer with the guilty, and nature's own antidote to what is a 

 pest to the fruit grower is swept along with the pest into a common 

 grave. 



If it be true, and there is no doubt it is, that a modern fruit plantation 

 is not fully equipped without spray machines and the materials for spray- 

 ing, it is also true that judgment is needed in the use of them or much 

 money may be thrown away. A spray should be looked upon as a remedy 

 for a certain disease, only to be used when that disease appears. Some 

 people talk as though spraying should be done after the manner of the 

 man who on leaving home on Monday whipped his children all round 

 because they would be sure to deserve it before he came home again! The 

 pests, insect and fungoid, that affect fruit trees form a horrible list as set 

 out by the entomologist and the mycologist, but so do the diseases that 

 human nature is subject to when one is silly enough to read a doctor's 

 book. As a matter of fact those that are responsible for serious injury are 

 few in number in both cases. (See Vol. I., p. 170 et seq.}. 



Dealing with Apples first, the principal are: (a) The Canker Fungus; 

 (6) The Apple Sucker; (c) The Codlin Moth; (d) The Maggots of the Winter 



