No. 4.] FRUIT GROWING. 83 



that I have made more money out of them than any other 

 man. It makes a bad-.shaped tree, but it gives us alxmdant 

 crops. AVe do not thin the fruit very much until after the 

 pit is formed in the peach, because there is what is called the 

 "June dropping," and it would l^e rather unwise to do the 

 thinning until nature has done its share ; but after the fruit 

 has set for a full crop, then we go in there with our men and 

 pick oft* the surplus fruit. In a general way w^e aim to get 

 the fruit oft' so that there shall be no two peaches within four 

 inches of one another, and many times even six inches. That 

 is the general rule we go by, and we try to impress upon 

 our men that that is what we want them to do ; l)ut we find 

 it the most difticult thing in the world to get men to thin 

 fruit enough. It looks terrible to attack a tree that is loaded, 

 and take oft* al)out all the fruit, — cover the ground with 

 peaches as big as walnuts, and only leave a few on the tree. 

 It is the most difticult thing in the world, as I say, to get 

 our men to do it. My next-door neighbor, a kindly old 

 gentlemen who has lived there all my life, Avho when I was 

 a small boy was very kind to me and has helped us all 

 through, when, in 1889, I set some boys at work thinning 

 the fruit, came to me and said, — calling me by my Christian 

 name, as he always did, — " Do you know what those boys 

 are doing out there ? They are tearing all the fruit off" your 

 peach trees." I hitched up the horse, took him in the carriage 

 and we went to the orchard. When we got there I said, 

 "Mr. Kinney, the boys are not doing enough; they ought 

 to take oft' twice as many as they do." You can hardly thin 

 the fruit too much. You may thin, and thin, and then thin 

 some more, until you get the three grades of peaches that I 

 spoke of. We have one laljel for what we call the extra red 

 grade. We are patriotic sometimes, and we took red, white 

 and blue for our colors, — red for the extra size, white for 

 the No. 1, and blue for the seconds. Now, there are about 

 seventy-five peaches of the extra red-label grade in a half- 

 l)ushel basket; the No. I's do not look very much smaller, 

 but there are one hundred and twenty-five to one hundred 

 and fifty in a basket ; the seconds have from one hundred 

 and eighty to two hundred and twenty-five in a basket; so 

 that there are about three times as many peaches in a basket 



