46 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



wheels, and it comes nearer to doing all the work in the 

 orchard in one day than anything else I have ever seen. Our 

 teams have done as much as 20 acres in a day with this har- 

 row. The California orchard plow consists of a gang of four 

 discs at the end of a long beam, and its strong point is that 

 one can get close up to the trees with the plow and still keep 

 the team well away. We have found it better than any other 

 plow we have yet tried. The " orchard cultivator " is an 

 implement with rigid teeth, and is especially useful where 

 there is hard work to be performed ; that is, where the soil 

 is heavy and the weeds are bad. Under such conditions the 

 light-draft harrow will not work satisfactorily. 



A practice which has become a regular thing in our or- 

 chards is thinning the fruit. I believe that it is hard to 

 overestimate the value of this operation. It not only gets 

 rid of the poor, defective specimens that would be of little 

 or no value at picking time, and so relieves the owner of the 

 necessity of deciding what to do with them, but it also re- 

 lieves the tree of the strain of developing these fruits to ma- 

 turity, and consequently makes annual crops more probable. 



Many people are deterred from thinning by the idea that 

 it is an endless and costly job. Our advice to such people 

 would be to try it. We have had our thinning done prin- 

 cipally by boys about fifteen years of age, and we find it costs 

 us about 40 cents per tree to thin the fruit on full-sized bear- 

 ing apple trees, and about 2 cents to thin a peach tree that 

 will bear two to three baskets. With the apples our prac- 

 tice is to go over the tree twice, the first time about the 10th 

 of July and the second time a month later. The first time 

 our orders are to thin so that no spur will have two apples. 

 Defective fruits are also removed. The second time we look 

 especially for defective fruits, but also thin out where the 

 fruit looks thick. I do not believe any other practice, with 

 the exception of spraying, is more important if one wishes 

 to grow the best fruit. 



I cannot let this opportunity pass without mentioning the 

 record of a small Baldwin orchard that was on the land when 

 we bought it. The trees are probably thirty-five years old, 

 and were so poor that it was seriously suggested that they 



