27 



which are in addition too often forced to grow two crops 

 every year, — a crop of fruit and a crop of hay. 



The fourth factor in their success is spraying. It is a 

 business proposition with them, and they never neglect it. 

 One hears of orchards which are sprayed five, six, seven or 

 even more times in a season; and experimental spraying 

 at the Oregon Agricultural College has shown that 99 per 

 cent of their apples can be kept free from worms or fungous 

 diseases, and many of their orchardists are approaching very 

 close to this in actual practice by proper spraying. "With us 

 in 'New England the orchard which is sprayed at all is the 

 exception ; and usually one, or at most two, sprayings are 

 all that even these orchards receive. 



A fifth element of their success is certainly cultivation. 

 It is thorough and continuous, so that all the power of the 

 soil goes to making fine foliage and fine fruit, instead of 

 being divided up among weeds, grass and fruit trees, as is 

 too often the case with us. 



The sixth factor in the conquest of our markets by western 

 fruit, and the one which more than all others has given them 

 the inside track, is, in the writer's opinion, their method of 

 handling and grading and packing their fruit after it is 

 grown. Even with our faulty methods of growing fruit, we 

 produce a lot of fine apples but nine-tenths of them are not 

 marketed so as to command the highest price which their 

 quality would warrant ; while with the western grower the 

 grading and packing is such as to insure the apples reaching 

 the consumer in perfect condition. Not only is every apple 

 perfect or practically so, — the few blemished ones which 

 they produce being discarded, — but they are graded so that 

 all the apples in each box are exactly alike. Fig. 1 shows 

 two boxes of western apples. — a box of Spitzenbergs, from 

 A. I. Mason, Hood River, Ore. ; and a box of Grimes' Golden, 

 packed by Stirling & Pitcairn, Kelowna, B. C, which the 

 writer had shipped to Amherst for use in his classes in 

 pomolnoy. And though these boxes came clear across the 

 continent alone, by express, thus receiving much rougher 

 handling than they would if shipped in car lots, as is usual, 



