STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 63 



these trees have done the past three years. Many of them have not 

 come into bearing yet and they are all young. Upon our exhibition 

 tables Mr. Whittier has kindly placed an exhibit of his evaporated 

 apples, from which he tells you he has netted this year over $1,000. 

 Doesn't this evaporated fruit suggest to you that our fruit has a 

 market value not yet appreciated by our farmers ? There is no danger 

 that evaporated apples like these will not sell for a fancy price, and 

 Mr. Whittier has no monopoly in their production. 



Some twelve years ago, Mr. Nelson Libby purchased seventeen 

 acres of land in the town of Temple, upon which a gentleman had 

 set a fine lot of apple trees. A set of ordinary farm buildings was 

 erected, and twenty-five acres of pasture land was purchased upon 

 the other side of the highway. The first purchase cost $500. A 

 little over a year ago he was offered $5000 for his fruit farm, and 

 he was unwilling to sell for less than $7000. The past three years 

 this orchard has averaged some over 600 barrels each year ; besides, 

 the last year he raised over 100 bushels of pears. The pasture land, 

 I will add, is just as good for orcharding as the orchard itself. 



In the northern part of Phillips, Mr. Silas M. King & Son have 

 developed a fine fruit farm. A meadow has been converted into a 

 cranberry bed, where as fine berries are grown as anywhere in 

 Maine. Apples, pears, plums and grapes here thrive wonderfully 

 well, and yet the entire farm without the fruit planted upon it would 

 be worth no more than pasturage or timber land in the same locality. 

 Last spring, Hon. R. P. Thompson & Son of Jay purchased an 

 upland farm for about $2500. The farm cuts some thirty tons of 

 hay, and is well divided into tillage and wood land. The original 

 owner set in one pasture 300 native apple trees, and set them to 

 Baldwins. This man, strange as it may seem, is driving a truck 

 team in one of our cities. But the orchard this year produced some 

 over 300 bushels of marketable apples. After fencing the lot, prun- 

 ing and mulching the trees for an undivided half of the orchard, a 

 reliable party offered one-half the price paid for the entire farm only 

 a few months earlier. Thus it is, thousands of acres of our rocky, 

 unprofitable hillsides could be economically converted into profit-pay- 

 ing orchards. All it needs is the intelligent, wide-awake farmer to 

 take advantage of the situation. There are others here who have 

 made equally as good records as those referred to, but enough to show 

 how orchaiding enhances the value of these lands has been said. 



