50 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



acres, — in June, and also in September, and saw the whole 

 method. He grows his trees in this way : this land is very 

 wet, naturally, although there is an inclination to it, and it 

 has been thrown up in beds, — that is, it has been ploughed, 

 so that it is rounded up in beds, perhaps two rods and a half 

 wide, and, in what would be the dead furrows, stone drains 

 have been laid. These stone drains are not nearly as service- 

 able as tiles, and it is not economy to lay them ; as I sug- 

 gested to Mr. Fenno, it would be a great deal better to put 

 in tile drains. In the centre of those ridges is a strip of 

 ground, about ten feet wide, in which the trees are set. You 

 will observe that the trees, by that method, are very thick in 

 the row, one way, — I cannot say how thick, but there is a 

 wide space between the rows. Those trees, on that land, he 

 tells me, have not been manured for ten years, and were not 

 manured to any great extent when they were planted. How 

 they hold their vigor, is more than I can say, — perhaps it is 

 partly owing to the management. They are mostly on pear- 

 roots, and, being exposed to the wind, — Chelsea Beach being 

 a little way off, — they are kept headed down very low. I 

 should say, from one-half to two-thirds of the new growth is 

 cut from those trees every year. Then the pears are thinned ; 

 and although almost every tree, when I was there in Sep- 

 tember, had a large crop, there were no poor pears on those 

 trees, of any consequence. He told me that three-quarters of 

 them had been picked off. He is very careful, when thinning 

 pears, never to allow two to grow together, because, as any 

 grower will tell you, if you leave two or three pears in a 

 bunch, if there is a worm in that vicinity, he will get in 

 between those two pears, and spoil both of them. In this 

 way, he raises nothing but perfect fruit, and has been enabled, 

 to my certain knowledge, to get about double price, in Boston 

 market, for more than two or three thousand bushels of pears 

 this year. Mr. Fenno told me, last Saturday, that he had 

 got for his Beurre Clairgeaus — which is a reasonably poor 

 pear, one which I would not eat myself, but it sells in the 

 market — an average of $4.50 a bushel. In quality, the Beurre 

 Clairgeau is as good as Mr. Gold's Vicars, which are not good 

 for anything, in my judgment. I would not have them. 

 They are not good for cooking. 



