28 WORCESTER COUNTY HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. [1875. 



One year the market is glutted with apples and the grower is unable to 

 realize any profit on his crop. The next year there are few apples to be 

 had and the price is such that no customer can afford to buy them at all. 

 One year the best quality is unsaleable at a dollar a ban-el ; the next it 

 readily sells at S4, and fruit that the previous year would have gone to 

 the cider mill is actually taken to market and goes quickly at $2, or even 

 more. In view of these facts the question has been mooted whether it 

 be not possible artificially to change the bearing year of apple trees and 

 compel them to bear apples when the}' are likely to be wanted ? 



Sanguine theorizers answer affirmatively and say that a tree may be 

 made to bear in the odd year by preventing it from bearing in the even 

 year, and its more abundant crops will afterwards occur in the odd years. 

 Credat Judceus until it be established by future experience. Meantime I 

 challenge it as contrarj'^ to all past experience, so far as recorded or 

 remembered. It is within the personal recollection of every careful ob- 

 server now in middle life that during the last thirty years, although the 

 apple trees of New England have been frequently prevented from bear- 

 ing in the even year by natural causes — frosts, insects, and sometimes 

 unknown causes — there has never been a single large crop of apples in 

 an odd year. In accordance with the sanguine answer to the mooted 

 question, the next year following the failure of an apple crop in an even 

 year from any natural cause, ought to have been thenceforth established 

 as the bearing year. That this result has not followed would seem to 

 point to the existence of some occult cause of the even year periodicity 

 of apple plenty. 



Nevertheless let those who believe they can change the bearing year of 

 apples persist in their experiments. If they can establish their theory as 

 a fact, it is a most important fact, and well worth knowing. If an apple- 

 grower who last year had 1000 barrels of marketable apples to sell and 

 waited for customers till he found one-half of his apples rotten and then 

 sent the rest to the cider maker, could by some art have deferred his last 

 year's crop till this year, he would have made his occupation the envy of 

 every merchant and manufacturer in the country. It is not a priori im- 

 possible — the discovery of such an art. Neither is it impossible but that 

 human wit may some time invent some art whereby to keep apples over 

 from a year of plenty to a year of scarcity. Find a way to keep apples as 

 you can keep wheat, and every apple-grower in the country, as well as 

 you, the finder thereof, is a made man. 



Notwithstanding the shortness of the apple crop, the Annual Exhibition 

 of apples by this Society was highly creditable. The contrast between 



