68 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



As to the question of varieties, that depends so much on 

 outside issues, local issues, — as we heard some years ago 

 that the tariff depended wholly on "local issues," — the 

 question of varieties depends so much on local conditions 

 that it would be of no use to go into it here at this time. It 

 depends much on the soil, much on the markets, much on 

 the climatic conditions. There are all those things that 

 each individual must work out and find out for himself in 

 his peculiar situation, and no one man, no dozen men, can 

 tell him off-hand what to do. That is a matter depending 

 largely, as I say, on locality and soil. Of course there are 

 a few standard varieties of apples, pears, peaches and plums, 

 that, as a general rule, do well anywhere ; but if a man is 

 going into the business of fruit culture for profit he must 

 study it from his own stand-point. For instance, I am 

 located only eight miles from the city of Hartford, and I 

 cannot grow the Beurre Bosc pear ; and yet in the city of 

 Hartford they can be grown better than anywhere in Amer- 

 ica. So these things will come in all the time. 



In these days of consolidation, co-operation, trusts and 

 monopolies of all kinds, which are bad in one way and won- 

 derfully good and productive of beneficial results in another 

 way, it seems to me that there is a good opportunity for the 

 development of horticulture on the line of co-operation. 

 The man who has a " general-purpose " farm and is producing 

 all sorts of crops, and among other things has twenty-five, 

 fifty or seventy-five apple trees scattered about his place, 

 who does not have time, or will not, at any rate, prune 

 them and fertilize them, because he is very busy with other 

 work, who has not the thne to pick them just in the right 

 stage of maturity, and has not enough of them to get first- 

 class new l)arrels to pack them in the pro})cr shape, but 

 ium])s at it in a rough-and-ready way, and markets them in 

 all sorts of ways but the right way, — for such a man there 

 is no money in apple culture ; and that is the Avay that 

 most of tlie ap])le trees in New England that do not pay 

 very much })rofit are treated. I believe, Mr. Chairman, that 

 the apple orchards of Worcester County, Mass., alone, if 

 handled properly on a business basis from last Ajn'il to this 

 first day of December, would have put at least $300,000 



