STATE PO?*rOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 4I 



it next year, as it is said to be a slow acting fertilizer. The con- 

 clusion I arrived at on this point is that the best way to get color 

 is to have the trees far enough apart and prune them so as to let 

 in God's sunlight, for I believe it will give the fruit a better color 

 and flavor than any sort of a fertilizer and it costs less money. 

 I have read and been told that you cannot grow a crop of 

 grass and fruit on the same ground at a profit, but my experience 

 the last two seasons does not agree with this theory. My large 

 orchard was seeded down to grass ten years ago and it has been 

 cut for hay ever since, and in no year during that time have I 

 harvested so large a crop of fruit and hay as I have the present 

 season. There is another advantage that I will mention in this 

 connection — the aftermath makes a good cover crop, which I 

 will allow is of some use, as it makes a soft bed for the fruit to 

 drop on, which prevents bruising and you get a little more No. i 

 f fruit. I firmly believe that orchards which are standing in grass 

 as most of our orchards do, that are of good bearing size, that 

 there is no fertilizer in use at the present time that can be used 

 wuth so little labor and will give such quick returns as the Fisher 

 formula, on both fruit and hay. I should not dare to recom- 

 mend it for young orchards before they come into good bearing 

 size, as I have had no experience in that direction. I will not 

 recommend any method of treatment any further than my 

 experience goes to prove it. If I had known that I should have 

 been called on to give the results of my experiments this season 

 I would have arranged them so that I could have given them in 

 a more definite form. As it is I shall state the facts as they are 

 in a general way and you can judge of their merits for your- 

 selves. 



Last spring I purchased of Lister's Agricultural Chemical 

 Works, No. 364 Commercial street, Portland, Me., about three 

 tons of chemicals and mixed them myself and applied the fer- 

 tilizer to about all of my apple and one-half of my pear trees, 

 using from eight to ten pounds to the apple and from five to 

 eight to the pear, according to the size. My main orchard is 

 twenty-six years old, and the others are from two to ten years 

 older. In no year have I ever sold over six hundred barrels of 

 apples from them all and only one year as many as that, which 

 was in 96. This season I have sold 948 barrels of apples and 



