210 THE NEW HORTICULTURE. 



will stand on well-kept lawns, or in pastured lots, where, 

 yearly fed with proper food and sprayed, their sturdy limbs, 

 clothed with dark foliage of healthy green, will bend beneath 

 their loads of perfect fruit, while yellows, blight, root-tumor 

 and black-knot will be but ugly recollections of the past. 

 That with rational, natural treatment all this is possible, will 

 be seen from the two following quotations from the January 

 issue of Green' s Fruit- Grower, published in the heart of the 

 great fruit belt of Western New York. Mr. L. B. Pierce, 

 writing of the "Summer Rambo" apple, says: 



We have a tree standing over the south kitchen door that is about 

 twenty years old, from a root-graft, and spreads forty feet, and is 

 thirty feet high. Last year it was the only one on the place that 

 bore apples smooth and large enough to use. This tree bore about 

 three bushels, and furnished pie timber for about two months. The 

 entire apple crop on four hundred other trees [presumably long- 

 rooted, etc. H. M. s.] was less than a bushel. This year this tree 

 is bending beneath its load of fruit, and about the middle of August 

 I was obliged to pick a part to relieve the burden. The apples were 

 at that date as large as Baldwins and partially colored, and sold 

 readily at twenty cents a peck. The tree should be planted in a 

 sheltered place and the ground strewed with straw, as the apples 

 ripen gradually, and, being large and heavy, drop and bruise. 



The editor, Mr. Chas. E. Green, in another place, writes: 



I know of a Baldwin apple tree located at the rear of the kitchen, 

 near the house drain, where its roots received weekly ablutions from 

 the wash tubs. I do not dare to state the annual yield of this tree, 

 for it was beyond belief [probably another root-graft or seedling 

 H. M. s.]. I have two apple trees in Rochester near an old hen-house, 

 on the rich soil of which the roots feed ; also two located near my 

 stable. These trees seldom fail to bear crops of fine fruit, though 

 the soil is not cultivated. 



Presumably all the latter trees were seedlings, as people 

 do not set two apple trees in a place as were those near the 

 hen-house or usually plant two near a stable. I leave these 

 nuts for my long root, big hole, deep plowing, summer culti- 

 vating readers to crack. 



Duplicates of such root-graft or seedling trees are stand- 

 ing all over the country. Will not some advocate of the 

 above-named methods explain fully, and give us the whys 

 and wherefores of the strange fact that everywhere, the world 

 over, fruit trees show such partiality for houses? 



