68 STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



Next to thorough cultivation, inteUigent and careful pruning 

 is one of the essentials to successful fruit culture. To give a 

 thorough talk on pruning would require one whole session of 

 your society and I can only hint at it now. The question of 

 pruning is a local one, depending upon the tree itself, upon the 

 soil it is in, and what you want to prune for so that no man can 

 lay down any definite rules of pruning, only the broad and gen- 

 eral one of doing some pruning every year, pinching a little here 

 and getting it that way, and a little there and getting it the other 

 way, a general training up instead of letting it grow at will and 

 finally putting it in jail to reform, that is giving it an everlasting 

 slashing once in four or five years. The pruning is for several 

 purposes. One is to let sunlight in upon the fruit. 



The next essential to fruit culture, it seems to me, is thinning 

 the fruit. If you plant a tree in soil prepared as well as possible, 

 and prune it as we ought to year after year, when it comes in 

 bearing it will be inclined to produce too much fruit, and there- 

 fore a thinning off of a large proportion of whatever may set 

 on the tree is absolutely essential to the production of fine fruit. 

 This question depends largely on your courage and your knowl- 

 edge and on your wants, but as a general proposition, every tree 

 develops from two or three to ten times as many fruit buds every 

 year as it ought to develop in fruit. If the first time it comes 

 to bearing, — take an apple for instance. — I may be treading on 

 dangerous ground, — but taking an apple, when it has got to be 

 five or six or eight years old, according to the locality, it will 

 bear its first fruit. If it should set forty apples the first year, 

 take off thirty apples and leave ten well distributed over the tree. 

 The chances are that the next year it will produce a hundred, 

 and if it does pick off seventy-five. The following year it may 

 attempt two hundred. If it does, pick off a hundred and fifty, 

 "because the seeds in that extra amount of apples will sap the 

 vitality of the trees and you want to get the tree into annual 

 bearing. 



Here is a point you are going to differ on. Some will say, "1 

 would like to see a man make Baldwin apples bear every year." 

 But if a Baldwin apple or any other apple is brought up in the 

 wav it should go and the fruit is thinned from the start and it 

 is never allowed to overbear, it is nineteen to one in favor of its 

 bearing annually. The trouble is you let the tree, the first time 



