l8o THE CONNECTICUT POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY 



However, orchard planting still goes on, until now there 

 are about 1,500,000 trees in the state. It is estimated by 

 careful observers that about one-half of them are being kept 

 almost free from yellows and are likely to be profitable. 

 The other half are either so infested with the disease or so 

 neglected that the trees are not likely ever to be very profi- 

 table to their owners, while they are a standing menace to 

 near-by land owners, who might be able to grow healthy 

 and profitable orchards if these disease-spreading trees were 

 out of the way. 



Were it not for the yellows, Connecticut would be as 

 reliable a peach state as any in the Union. In the last 

 twenty years it has had ten full crops of fruit, three fairly 

 good ones, three partial ones, and four almost total fail- 

 ures. One of the failures was caused by a frost in May, 

 when the trees were in bloom ; one by two weeks of warm 

 rainy weather at blooming time, and all others by extremes 

 of frost, from 12 to 22 degrees below zero, that killed the 

 dormant buds in winter. Six years out of the eight the freez- 

 ing was done between December 22 and January 2 ; once 

 it was done late in January, and once again late in Feb- 

 ruary. The older so-called peach-growing states cannot 

 show as good a record as this. 



Commercial peach planting in Connecticut, at the open- 

 ing of 1900, is mostly in orchards of from five to ten acres 

 in extent. Quite a large number of orchards cover from 

 20 to 30 acres ; three or four of them cover 50 acres or 

 so. The Hale & Coleman orchard, in Oxford, near Sey- 

 mour ; that of J. Norris Barnes, at Yalesville, and those of 

 J. H. Hale, at South Glastonbury, are each over 100 acres 

 in extent. 



