SECRETARY'S REPORT. 83 



nutrition goes to the support of useless brandies, or a redun- 

 dancy of fruit, abstracts tliat strength from the tree which 

 would otherwise be appropriated to the perfection of tlie crop, 

 and the development of the spurs which would bear fruit the 

 next year. One of the best cultivators in the vicinity of Boston 

 has reduced this theory to practice, with the liappicst cfl'ect, in 

 the cultivation of the pear. His system allows no useless wood, 

 nor more fruit spurs, and no more fruit than the tice can 

 properly sustain. As a consequence, he produces every year 

 superior fruit, whicli commands the highest price. Some have 

 doubted whether this practice can be made remunerative, except 

 in its application to the finer fruits. But another cultivator, 

 in the vicinity of Boston, who raises an annual crop of the best 

 apples, assures us that the secret of his success is the thinning 

 of the fruit, and he has no doubt of the economy of the practice- 

 No good farmer doubts the necessity of thinning his root crops* 

 no vigneron the propriety of thinning his grapes. 



Light, air, and moisture, are essential to the production of 

 vegetable products, and especially of fine fruits. Who has not 

 observed that the best specimens of fruits on a tree are ordina- 

 rily those which are most exposed to these elements ? Who 

 does not select the full-sized ruddy fruit, which has had free 

 communion with light, heat, and air, in preference to tlie half 

 fed specimen which has shared its own proper nourishment 

 with five or six crowded rivals on the same spur ? 



An experienced English cultivator says :" The bending of 

 branches of trees by an overcrop of fruit is most injurious, for 

 the pores of the woody stalk are strained on the one side of the 

 bend, and compressed on the other ; hence the vessels through 

 which the requisite nourishment flows being partially shut up, 

 the growth of the fruit is retarded in proportion to the straining 

 and compression of the stalk." This is illustrated in the over- 

 bearing of some varieties, which, from a redundancy of fruit, 

 without the process of early and thorough thinning, seldom 

 produce good specimens, and in a few years become stinted and 

 unhealthy trees. The overbearing of a tree is as much a tax 

 upon its energies and constitution, as is the exhaustion of a 

 field by excessive crops of the same kind, year after year, 

 without a return of nutritive materials. Inexhaustible fertility 

 is a chimera of the imagination. However fertile at first, the 



