84 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



with the blue label as there are in one with the red label, and 

 the 'No. I's will sell for three times as much per peach and 

 the extra red grade for six times as much per peach as the 

 seconds ; and the seconds will exhaust the tree nearly three 

 times as much as the extra reds, because it is the pit in the 

 peach that exhausts the tree, and a tree that overbears always 

 exhausts itself. I have had people come into my peach 

 orchard and say, "You have got a splendid crop," and I 

 had, but I had to prop the trees up, and then after one 

 crop they died. They killed themselves by overwork. So 

 that thinning pays in preserving the life and vitality of 

 the trees, and it pays also because I can get six times as 

 much per peach for the highest grade as I can get for the 

 lowest. 



Secretary Sessions. I would like to ask the speaker 

 whether he thinks thinning apples would pay. 



Mr. Hale, I think it would. It would pay you to give 

 much better care to your apple trees than you do. I tell 

 you, if I had an apple orchard that is treated as most of your 

 orchards are, I should be ashamed to look a good honest 

 apple tree in the face. 



Mr. AYare. How many years will a peach orchard con- 

 tinue to give paying crops of peaches ? 



Mr. Hale. I do not know ; I have not got there yet. 

 We have some trees that are fourteen years old, and the 

 tinest fruit we had this year came from a fourteen-year-old 

 tree. We got more fruit for which we used our red labels 

 from a tree fourteen years old than from any other tree. 

 They are not all dead yet, although of course there are many 

 missing trees in that old orchard. 



Question. Do you trim a young orchard as you do an 

 old one ? 



Mr. Hale. On the same principle, but the trees do not 

 make wood as rapidly, and so do not ro(]uire so much 

 triunning. 



Question. How long did you ever know a peacli tree to 

 live? 



Mr. Hale. I know one in Connecticut that is a little 

 over a hundred years old. There is one on our farm that 

 is over sixty, and one in Woodbury, Conn., al)out fifty years 



