STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY, 87 



Mr. Hardy : I would like to ask the gentleman what time, 

 what size or stage he would recommend thinning the apples. 



Mr. DeCoster : They should be thinned the first of July. It 

 is not all apples that need thinning. Rhode Island Greening, 

 Northern Spy, don't need thinning. I don't know as the Ben 

 Davis does. I am not a Ben Davis man, don't raise but a very 

 few. But more especially the Baldwin, they should be thinned 

 by the first of July. I wish you would experiment, gentlemen, 

 and note the results. 



Dr. TwiTCHELL : In the President's address this morning, 

 you remember he emphasized the necessity of cultivation and 

 fertilization as solving the questions in the future relative to our 

 orchards, and Prof. Munson said to me coming up yesterday 

 that they had taken three or four successive crops of Baldwins 

 from certain trees and he believed that it should be credited to 

 the cultivation and fertilization of the trees. If that is so, then 

 we are to solve some of the vexed problems of the future by 

 higher fertilization and cultivation. Having tried a little experi- 

 ment this summer on the farm, I took a photograph of some of 

 the trees and brought one of them with me simply to illustrate 

 what can be done at very little expense. We applied some 

 of Fisher formula to 200 trees, leaving out some, so that I might 

 see the difference. Mr. Gilbert was there in x\ugust and went 

 over the trees and expressed his surprise at the thickness and 

 strength and hardiness of the leaf and the growth of the grass 

 underneath, and also the marked growth of new wood. I have 

 a photograph taken about the 12th of September which shows 

 the second crop of grass growing about the trees, covering the 

 space where the ten pounds of fertiHzer was spread. What is 

 most marked, these trees are old, have not been touched for ten 

 or fifteen years, nothing been done to them, — and yet those old 

 neglected trees made a wood growth this year of from two feet to 

 two and one-half feet, giving promise of something in the future 

 which I hope may be of value. Now I do not think that can be 

 attributed to anything excepting the application of ten pounds 

 of Fisher formula, costing about twenty-eight cents a tree. I 

 would not follow that another year, but I would put in some 

 other form of fertilization, or cultivation — something different — 

 but to give old trees a start and set them at work in the right 



