80 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



towns of Scitiiate and Marshfield, there have been several 

 who have gone into raising peaches. I recollect one man 

 especially, who has a very large farm. He had about a 

 thousand trees on a hill, and I do not think that he ever got 

 a peach off of those trees. He cut them all down when they 

 were five or six years old. Dr. Ham, also of my town, set 

 out some three hundred trees, and he never succeeded in 

 raising anything to speak of. I have been as successful as 

 any one there with peaches on a small scale, — perhaps an 

 acre or so ; I do not know how many trees. A few. years 

 ago I made a hen fence around my peach orchard, which 

 was on the north side of a hill. In that way I succeeded in 

 raising large crops of good peaches. But they were native 

 trees. Two years ago I removed the hen yard, and then I 

 did not succeed in raising any crop. I put the hens back 

 into the yard, and I have now a few nice peaches. I at- 

 tribute that mostly to three causes : to the hens, that pick 

 out the worms and scratch the ground and keep it cultivated, 

 to putting the trees on the north side of a hill, and to the 

 fact that they are native trees. 



Mr. Hale. Of course the gentleman does not expect me 

 to go into a long talk about peach culture. He has men- 

 tioned the fact that a neighbor of his planted a peach orchard 

 of a thousand trees, cultivated them well for a few years, 

 and then cut them all down because he did not get the crops 

 he anticipated. I think he said the trees were about five 

 years old when they were cut down. If a man has no more 

 spunk than that, he ought not to plant peach trees in Massa- 

 chusetts. Of course he would make a failure of it. A man 

 who cannot wait more than five years will get left. 



Now, our extensive planting of peach orchards began in 

 1878 or 1879, and the trees ought to have borne a crop, 

 according to all reason, in 1882 or 1883 ; but in the spring 

 of 1883 the buds were all dead, and they were dead in the 

 spring of 1884, and we had put into them all the money we 

 had the good luck to scrape up, because we never had a 

 dollar that we did not dig out of that old farm. But we 

 wanted more fertilizers, the fertilizer men wanted more 

 money, and we had to ask some good friends to endorse our 

 notes that we might get more money at the bank. We were 



