6 An American Fruit-Farm 



and its chief asset is time. If you also have capital, 

 you have two credits. Use your credit, it is your 

 capital. Better use your credit than lose time in 

 planting orchard or vineyard, or in attempting 

 to nurse a worn-out vineyard or orchard back to 

 health and productivity. Possibly it may be done, 

 but so rarely, and with such cost of labor and time, 

 that a wholly new deal is preferable. It is time 

 that makes the Tree, and Time and the tree make 

 the fruit-farm. Better tear out unprofitable varie- 

 ties and plant profitable ones than to suffer the 

 years to pass and your fruit-farm become mere 

 vines and shade trees. The annual labor bills are 

 as high for poor varieties as for good ones. 



It costs more to run an unprofitable than a 

 profitable orchard. Time works for you or against 

 you with equal vigor. Your fruit-farm is deteri- 

 orating, your neighbor's is improving, — and at 

 the same time. I have never heard of the fruit- 

 farmer who got ahead of his varieties, but I have 

 heard of varieties that forced the fruit-farmer be- 

 hind. A Concord grape is preferable to a score, 

 yes, to a dozen score of other varieties for the Lake 

 Shore Valley. In other valleys conditions may be 

 different. We must farm with conditions, not 

 against them. A Montmorenci cherry is prefer- 

 able to an Early Richmond, yet we may hesitate 

 to cut down bearing Richmonds and set in Mont- 

 morenci ; but we need not set out the objectionable 

 variety, and if our orchards are yet young, we may 

 well afford to supplant the defective with the profit- 



