l8 THE AMERICAN APPLE ORCHARD 



to official inspection, and this inspection professes to 

 discover all trees infested with obnoxious insects or 

 fungous diseases and to throw them out of the mar- 

 ket. A great deal has been accomplished by this sys- 

 tem of inspection, although it must be said that in 

 some places it is less effective than in others, and even 

 at its best it cannot furnish an absolute guarantee of 

 immunity. The man who buys the trees should him- 

 self inspect them and he ought to be sure that he is 

 able to recognize the more important noxious in- 

 sects and fungous disease likely to be transmitted in 

 nursery stock. 



In the second place a tree should be well grown. 

 It should be clean and straight, with a well-formed 

 head. Of course the size and form of the head de- 

 pend greatly on the variety to which the tree belongs. 

 Some varieties of apples make better heads than 

 others. One should not expect Longfield to have as 

 well-formed heads ^as Ben Davis or Mclntosh. The 

 fact that tree buyers persist in laying too much stress 

 on this point has had a great influence in driving out 

 of the market many good varieties of apples simply 

 because they do not naturally form comely tops in the 

 nursery. While the buyer will always seek to secure 

 the cleanest and best- formed trees, he will not enforce 

 this rule at the expense of good varieties. 



A tree should be not only well grown, but well pre- 

 served. Most of our nursery stock, especially fruit 

 trees, is now dug in the fall and sold in the spring. 

 During the winter it is kept in storage. The idea 

 of keeping nursery trees in cold storage, as eggs and 

 apples are kept, appeals to most men as a dangerous 

 practice. It is not necessarily so, however. If trees 

 are well managed in storehouses they do not lose any 



