-4« 



HAKD POLLINATION IN ORCHARDS 



It may seem foolish to propose to run the bees out of their job by 

 pollinating apple blossoms by hand, ynt this is done quite extensively in 

 Pacific Coast orchards. Blossoms are collected at the balloon stage, al- 

 lowed to dry for about 24 hours when the pollen will be mature. It is 

 then collected in v;ido mouthod bottles and applied to the blossoms with 

 a camol's hair brush. Effort is made to pollinate only one flower of one- 

 fourth or even less of the blossom clusters. It is regarded more or loss 

 as a temporary; expedient where there are not enough trees of pollinating 

 varieties in the orchard. In some cases, hand pollination has given great 

 increases in yield. It seems to require 1 to 2 hours to pollinate a mature 

 tree. This mounts up to considerable expense but a bushel or two of apples 

 per tree is ample reward. It is doubtful if this method should have wide 

 application in Massachusetts but there laay be cases of orchards which have 

 produced light crops due to lack of pollination in v/hioh it would be v/orth 

 trying. If some of our grov/ers are interested, wo will be glad to prepare 

 directions for trying this method. 



- — J. K. Shaw 



SPRAY nJG AND DUSTING BY AIRPLANE 



Imagine dusting 100 acres of orchard in an hour! This is the re- 

 port from a large peach orchard in North Carolina. The results were re- 

 ported as good with much more dust required than for machine dusting but 

 the coverage was much better than with machine dusting. 



The second report of protecting the orchard from the air comes from 

 Yakima, Vfashington. (Quoting from Better Fruit, "The plane flew three to 

 four feet above the rows of trees which were a fourth of a mile long. Two 

 trips were made over each row. The spraying proceeded at the rate of an 

 acre in one ar^d one-.half minutes. The spray was 150 times as strong as 

 that applied from the ground, and only 42 gallons were used on the 40 acres. 

 Purpose of the application v/as to stop any dropping of fruit that might 

 occur before harvest time arrived and before the fruit could be picked. 

 The spray vms atomized into a fine mist that settled all through the trees 

 as numerous specks on the loaves and the fruit." The report goes on to say 

 that the hormone spray applied on Bartlett pears gave excellent results. 

 The number of drops from trees sprayed August 8 was checked August 21 to 29. 

 During this period an average of two pears per tree dropped from the airplauie 

 sprayed trees wiiile unsprayed trees dropped an average of 113 pears por- 

 tree. 



NOTES ON BITTER PIT 



Every few days someone asks the question, "How can bitter pit or 

 Baldwin spot be prevented?" If an answer to this question were known it 

 would have been given wide publicity. Some recent work Ih New York State, 

 hovfever, conducted by R. M. Smock, throws sarae now light on this problem. 

 His 12 point summary in Cornell Memoir 234 reads as follows j 



(1) ^plications of nitrogen during the growing season "to trees at 



