CHAPTER I. 



The New Dispensation. 



IN presenting the second part of this volume to the atten- 

 tion of the fruit-growing public, I do it with a feeling of 

 confidence that the time is ripe for a new dispensation of 

 horticultural truths, and while they may, with their novelty, 

 startle from their sleepy routine many of the high priests who 

 minister around the altars throughout the country, the kindly 

 reception awarded them in this section is an earnest of their 

 general adoption everywhere in the near future. The public 

 now demand the best of fruit, and they want it cheap. The 

 day of high prices has probably gone forever, and it is a 

 doubtful question whether fruit-growing, with the short-lived, 

 unproductive, diseased and insect-ridden trees of to-day, and 

 their uncertain crops, now pays. To practice the most ad- 

 vanced methods (taught by Mr. J. H. Hale, for instance, on 

 peaches, and by others on apples, pears, etc.) requires an 

 expenditure that is often not even covered by the receipts. 

 The amount of extra nurturing, coddling and special petting, 

 sometimes called " intensive handling," in the way of cultiva- 

 tion, pruning, thinning, fertilizing and spraying, to make pay 

 an orchard grown from three- or four-year-old, long, fibrous- 

 rooted trees, is appalling ; and when we contrast it with the cer- 

 tain, cheap and easy-going style in which the twenty-year-old 

 Rambo apple tree, mentioned in the last chapter of this vol- 

 ume, brings in the dollars, we may well cry, ' 'Hasten the good 

 time when all fruits can be thus grown!" That is the mis- 

 sion of this gospel of the "New Horticulture" I now advo- 

 cate, which, though nominally new, is really as old as the 

 morn in spring in the long, long ago, ages before Eve plucked 

 and Adam ate the apple, when the warm sunbeams kissed the 

 dew from the first modestly opening fruit blooms, whenever 

 that was. Its principles, from which we have now wandered 



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