68 STATE POAIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



PROFITABLE FRUIT GROWING IN MAINE. 

 By E. H. Cook, Vassalboro. 



Mr. Smiley in Vassalboro about sixty years ago set out an 

 orchard, and beginning when it was seventeen years old he 

 received an average of $500 a year from three acres of orchard- 

 ing every year for thirty years. In thirty years, from three 

 acres of orchard, without cultivation, pastured to sheep, he 

 received $15,000. And he has got the most of it now. 



I am well acquainted with a man who is now alive and in active 

 life, and likes a dollar just as well as he ever did, who set Bald- 

 win trees since he was sixty years old and has harvested eight 

 barrels from a single tree — planted after he was sixty years old 

 and he is still in active life. 



Albert R. Ward of China bought, ten years ago, 100 Ben Davis 

 apple trees and has cared for them since in a rotation of hoed 

 crops and clover — two hoed crops and one of clover. He has 

 mowed it one-third of the time. After getting this crop of clover 

 he would plow it. He has successfully raised that rotation of 

 crops on the piece of land, got just as much out of those crops 

 as he would if there had been no trees there ; gave $20 for his 

 100 trees ten years ago, and it cost him something to plant them. 

 Those trees have cost him nothing since except they have been 

 in the way a little in tilling the land and raising hoed crops and 

 clover, because he is going to get returns from his hoed crops 

 and clover. Now after the trees had been planted several years 

 he discovered that Ben Davis were not good for anything, and 

 he started in grafting and grafted twenty-five to Baldwins. Why 

 he stopped I don't know, but that is all he grafted to Baldwins, 

 twenty-five. That left him seventy-five Ben Davis trees. By 

 the time those seventy-five Ben Davis trees were ten years old 

 he received more than $400 in clean cash from the apples ; and 

 he has not received one dollar from his Baldwin trees. 



A man by the name of Lord up in Charleston, Penobscot 

 county, had, quite a few years ago, a fine young orchard — pretty 

 extensive for this land of little orchards, — and they had come to 

 bearing and borne a few years and he heard that Ben Davis were 



