CHAPTER XI. 



Blight. 



I WILL now give final and conclusive evidence in favor of 

 the internal theory of blight, from an experience with 

 that disease in my well known pear orchard at Hitch- 

 cock, in 1894. Up to that spring, not a case of blight had 

 ever been known in the coast country of Texas, and as this 

 orchard had borne heavy crops for five years none was 

 expected. It contained 1,250 Le Conte and 250 Kieffer, 

 standing on thirteen acres of ground, 500 eight, 500 nine and 

 500 ten years old, and while all had been heavily fertilized 

 every year, the 500 oldest received per acre one ton of cotton- 

 seed meal, and 500 pounds of the hull ashes, containing 30 

 per cent, potash and 8 per cent, phosphoric acid, annually 

 for five years. The trees bloomed like a snow bank in the 

 spring of 1893, and set an enormous crop. I knew that the 

 pears should be thinned, but having had heavy crops of fine 

 fruit before without it, concluded to break all records and let 

 them alone. No cotton-seed meal was applied that or the 

 preceding year, but a double quantity of the hull ashes. 



The ground had been in grass and mowed several times 

 for two years, but knowing that the trees had big work ahead, 

 ignorantly thinking to help them, the whole orchard was 

 lightly plowed in March and kept absolutely clean until July. 

 This was an easy task, for after May no more rain fell for 

 nearly three months. It may well be imagined what a 

 strain this put upon the trees, but, ever hoping rain would 

 come, they were let alone. The 250 oldest Le Conte were 

 ten years of age, and the heavy fertilizing had produced a 

 growth that was phenomenal. Many of them measured about 

 fourteen inches in diameter one foot above ground, were 

 thirty to thirty-four feet high, the limbs lapping across twenty- 

 five-feet rows, and a single tree gave twenty-seven 5o-pound 



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