SECRETARY'S REPORT. 



INJURED FRUIT TREES. 

 It might not seem necessary to mention the past winter in con- 

 nection with fruit growing were it not for the fact that the 

 winter is blamed by many for the injury suffered by our 

 orchards. So far as your Secretary is concerned he does not 

 "blame it all on the weather," while the injury is more serious 

 than most of our fruit growers realize, there are other conditions 

 that should be recognized. The Baldwin and Ben Davis suf- 

 fered the most. Those varieties are both free bearers, and the 

 growers look upon the tree hanging full of beautiful fruit and 

 rejoice over the magnificent crop of fruit promised. I do not 

 know of a fruit grower in Maine who has to any great extent 

 felt it necessary to relieve the trees of the heavy burdens they 

 were bearing. In one case the jDresent season a prominent 

 grower told me he had used over 1,500 stakes to prevent the 

 trees from breaking down. In a canvass covering a large num- 

 ber of orchards this fall a conspicuous fact appears : the dead 

 and injured trees are almost without exception trees that bore 

 heavily the year before. In other words the trees have been 

 so weakened by overbearing that they have not had. the power 

 to resist the cold. Many trees that have borne heavily this year 

 I found seriously injured, and it will be strange if there are not 

 many more dead trees next spring than the last. The Secretary 

 suggests whether it would not be wiser to pick off some fruit 

 and burn up the stakes. The extent of this injury was shown 

 by speakers at our meeting, who have been investigating orchard 

 conditions in the State. Yet notwithstanding this unfavorable 

 condition, the New England Homestead reports the crop in 

 ]\Iaine this year at 1,700,000 barrels, and in an editorial upon the 

 fruit situation remarks that ^Maine has now come to be an 



