No. 4.] FRUIT GROWING. 177 



Now for the result. Four out of five of the orchard were 

 No. 1 fruit ; four out of live of those that were not sprayed 

 were No. 2, — just tlie reverse. The Doctor says it would 

 not have cost twenty-five cents in time and material to have 

 sprayed these few trees that produced fruit in that way. 



With regard to thinning, he says a great many people 

 laugh at him about that, but he is satisfied that it is much 

 easier to thin the fruit at that time. He says some talk 

 about the trees being so large that it will take a long while 

 to do it, but he says a tree that will produce four barrels 

 of apples, if it is a very large tree, will take a man nearly 

 half a day sometimes to thin it. He says it does not cost 

 so much to pick the fruit at that time that is to be thrown 

 away as it does to pick it in October and then throw it away. 

 Then there is a double advantage. He gets the nutriment 

 of the whole tree into this amount of fruit that is of value, 

 and gets rid of that which is of no use. 



The apple may well be called the king of Massachusetts 

 fruits, yet how sadly it is neglected. You see our orchards 

 as you ride along the railroad, past these farms, not neces- 

 sarily abandoned farms, — the trees all gone to wrack and 

 ruin from sheer neglect. If you want a lamp to burn and 

 give you light, you must feed it with oil, and you must trim 

 it. Just as surely you must feed and trim your fruit trees 

 if you expect profitable returns. In reference to these trees, 

 in the first place, the planter, whoever he might be, thinks 

 if he digs a post-hole and puts the roots into the ground 

 that he is then going to get a profitable orchard by waiting a 

 little while. We all know what the result is. It goes too 

 far without pruning. Then he goes at it with a vengeance 

 and makes another mistake l)y taking out too much. On 

 my place, where I have lived a number of years, I found just 

 such an orchard, where the trees were in such condition that 

 you could not see the stumps of the trees, to say nothing about 

 getting near them. I have got most of them now so I can 

 see them and get near to them, but it has been almost mur- 

 der, it seemed to me, to do as I had to do in order to accom- 

 plish that ; l)ut I was going to have a good tree or I was not 

 going to have any. I was surprised after cultivating the 

 ground and giving the lamp some of this oil to feed on which 



