68 



tried that quite a number of years ago and it saved cutting 

 off young wood. Do it the other way and you destroy some 

 nice, young wood and some nice fruit. What gave me the 

 idea more than anything else was that sometimes a limb 

 would break off and it would be only a couple of years be- 

 fore a nice limb and some fine fruit would appear. I 

 thought that a good sign to go ahead and do the same with 

 the rest of the trees. I think trees want to be renewed; I 

 think you prolong the life of the tree, but I don't like to do 

 too much cutting. 



Snow storms spread the branches and help open heads 

 of the trees. The weight of snow for a day or two will bend 

 the limbs and they will hold their shape. 



When you graft a tree, the first limb generally grows 

 crooked, and as a general rule will bear pears more quickly 

 than any other part of the graft. I think if a person had 

 time to bend the branches over tending to retard the flow 

 of sap and put a weight on to hold them until they become 

 shaped, they would set fruit buds more quickly. 



It was about twenty-five or thirty years ago that we 

 were first struck by pear blight. It seemed to strike on the 

 Sheldon and after that it Avas severe on the Clapp's Favorite, 

 then the Bartlett. We were troubled with blight for three 

 years and some orchards were destroyed. Some of the trees 

 we cut back and they began to sucker out and made pretty 

 good trees again. 



The scale came next and we were in the same box again. 

 So we started spraying with lime-sulfur, and when that did- 

 n't seem to do any good I got discouraged and thought of 

 cutting the trees dowm. I didn't want to do that so I cut 

 out every other limb. The trees seemed to sucker out and 

 we sprayed with lime-sulfur and again with oil ; we killed 

 the scale and gave the trees a new chance. Today the trees 

 are in nice shape. They have suckered out and I didn 't cut 

 off the young suckers until they were a couple of years old, 

 and then I thinned out a few and let the rest grow. Two 

 years ago we had a pretty nice crop of Bartletts. Last year 



