FIFTEENTH ANNUAL MEETING. Ji 



A New Jersey Fruit Grower's Successful Fight 

 With the San Jose Scale. 



By William H. Skillman, Belle Mead, N. J. 



Mr. President, and brother frmt growers : I am always 

 glad to have a professor precede me ; he always takes all his 

 own time and half of mine, and that snits me and makes him 

 happy, too. I understand your rule is to adjourn about five 

 o'clock, and I am going to let you do it. Gentlemen, I am not 

 going to make a speech ; if I tried, I would fall down. I am 

 nothing- but a humble fruit grower, trying to make my bread 

 and butter out of fruit, trying to make both ends meet, and 

 I have met with the same success a gentleman did who, when 

 asked how he was getting along, said, "I am lucky to make 

 one end meat and the other bread." Now I am simply going to 

 give you my experience with the scale. When I first found I 

 had the San Jose, I had a block of Elberta peach trees, six or 

 seven hundred of them, and I found they went oiif color 

 the latter part of the season, and when a peach tree gets yellow 

 leaves on it, there is always something the matter. Next spring 

 I was putting on some muriate of potash, and a boy of mine 

 found something on the tree. He did not know what it was 

 and he came to me with it, and I didn't know what it was. and 

 I took it to the house and put it under a glass, and went to 

 looking at it and studying it, and I came to the conclusion 

 I had a pretty good dose of San Jose scale. T told the boy it 

 is all right ; the orchard has given me one or two good crops, 

 and wc will have more from it. Well, the scale knew more 

 about it than I did. and when T woke up in the spring, I 

 found those trees practically dead. 1 treated them with crude 

 oil, and I never knew what killed those trees until to-day 

 when these speakers told me, for I killed all of those trees 

 because I didn't use that crude oil intelligently. I found I 

 had a block of plum trees, four or five hundred, that had 

 the scale badly. .So T went to one of our learned professors in 

 New Jersey (I will call him "'Professor Jones") and he told 



