94 Commercial Gardening 



difference between fruit buds and wood buds on a tree. The result is 

 often deplorable. The best flower buds are destroyed, and numerous 

 sappy growths take their place season after season. The natural result 

 is no fruit, waste of money, labour, time, walls, nails, shreds. For these 

 troubles the weather, frost, foreign competition, and all sorts of things 

 except the real cause the ignorance of the pruner will be blamed, and 

 fruit growing on walls for market purposes will be voted a rank failure. 

 It would be found more economic and certainly more profitable to 

 employ trained gardeners in all matters appertaining to the pruning 

 and cultivation of fruit trees, and more especially when grown on walls. 



To keep Pears in a good fertile condition on walls, attention must be 

 given to pinching back the young growths during the summer months. 

 When 1 ft. or 18 in. in length, the tips should be pinched out with the 

 finger and thumb, or the shoots may be cracked and half-broken through, 

 so that they hang down. This stops further increase in length, without 

 causing the basal buds to start into twiggy shoots, but rather to remain 

 dormant and gorge themselves with the food that has been elaborated 

 by and in the leaves. Such shoots are shortened back to two or three 

 buds in winter. In the case of Pears, Apples, Plums, and Sweet Cherries, 

 the fruit spurs mostly form on branches from two to seven years of age, 

 and may be distinguished even in the summer months by their short 

 stumpy growth, and by the cluster of leaves around them. [j. w.] 



Cultivation for Market. The Pear may be taken to be a much less 

 important item in the market fruit plantation than either the Apple or the 

 Plum. It has not become so generally accepted as a food, and still is 

 regarded somewhat in the light of a luxury. Its value when cooked does 

 not seem to be widely appreciated, and, so far, the magicians of the 

 kitchen have not made popular any methods of dealing with the pear to 

 form a counterpart to the apple dumplings, apple tarts, and the various 

 other confections in which the apple plays a prominent part. For this 

 the pear itself does not seem to be at fault, but rather, perhaps, that 

 tendency in human nature which induces us to keep to the old paths 

 that the fathers trod, unless forced by something in the nature of an 

 earthquake to seek fresh ones, for stewed pears form surely one of the 

 most tasty of fruit dishes, and it can scarcely be doubted that cooked 

 pears could be made attractive in many forms, and who knows but they 

 might be made even to offer an alternative to the ubiquitous banana! 



Pears are much more particular as to soil than Apples; they need light, 

 warm, open soil, with plenty of sand in its composition. They like moisture 

 and good drainage. 



Without any question the best advice to a planter as regards Pears is: 

 plant them if you have " pear land ", and you will find no kind of fruit 

 give you more satisfaction, but if you plant them on land that is not " pear 

 land ", nothing you do will produce more disappointment. 



A distinguished professor, in the course of a paper on spraying, read to 

 a meeting of agriculturists, called attention to the samples of pears one 



