REMEDIES FOll INSECTS AND FUNGI INJURING FRUITS. 59 



MEETING FOR DTSCTSSTOX. 



IXSKCTS AND FlXOI Ixjl RING OIR FlU ITS, WITH ReMEDIKS 



Considered. 



By Samuel T. JIaynabd, Professor of Botany and Horticulture in the Massachu- 

 setts Agricultural College, Amherst. ^ 



At this season of the ^^ear fruit growers, market gardeners, and 

 farmers are making their plans for the work of the coming season, 

 and in their estimate of the income they hope to derive from their 

 crops, they reason, perhaps, something like this : One has one 

 hundred apple trees or one thousand grape vines, and if the apple 

 ti-ees are twenty years old they should yield at least three barrels 

 per tree, or the vines, if five years old or more, should yield ten 

 pounds per vine, or a total of ten thousand pounds, and reckoning 

 the prices at the average for a decade he gets upon paper very 

 satisfactory returns. 



But how many of us make our plaus for the coming year with 

 any degree of certainty that the results will give us eveu a fair 

 return for labor and interest on the capital invested? AVe know 

 too well from bitter experience the chances the crops must run with 

 frosts, with storm and wind, with drought and wet, and al)0ve all 

 with insects and the many l)lights, rusts, mildews, rots, and smuts, 

 thai feed upon and destroy the plants we cultivate. 



We have the authority of the Entomological Bureau of the 

 United States Department of Agriculture, for the statement that 

 the loss by insect depredations to the farming interests, including 

 all its branches, for the past year amounts to four hundred millions 

 of dollars. This almost inconceivable amount of money from the 

 destruction of our crops in one year I Yet who that has experi- 

 enced the loss of his grape crop liy mildew or rot, his apples 1)}' 

 the scab, his pears by the scab and blight, his plums by the Itlack 

 wart and rotting of the fruit, his cherries and peaches by rotting of 

 tlie fruit, his strawberries by the leaf blight, his potatoes by the 

 potato rot, his oats and grasses b}' the rust, his cabbage crop 

 b}' the club root, his celery bj- the leaf blight, his lettuce by the 

 mildew, and his cuttings and plants under glass by damping off, 

 will doubt that our losses are often as great from parasitic or 

 fungous plant growths as from insects, if not greater I 



It is seldom that we get a crop of any kind without a valiant 

 fight for it. Fortuuatel}' we have learned to feel that we are 

 greater than the foes that assail us, and that with each new insect 



