No. 4.] WESTERN METHODS IN ORCHARDING. 297 



and his chances of paying dividends are that much better. The skep- 

 tical may ask, "If this is so, why have our New England lands so long 

 gone begging?" and the writer frankly admits that he would like to 

 ask that question himself, though he certainly does not want to be 

 classed among the skeptical as to New England's possibilities in or- 

 charding. As nearly as it has been possible for the writer to figure 

 out a reply to this question, — which is certainly a legitimate one and 

 an important one, if we are to convince those intending to go into 

 orcharding that New England has distinct advantages to offer them, 

 — the reasons are about as follows : — 



1. There is the almost universal feeling that an orchard is a long- 

 time investment; that it is going to take years before any returns 

 will be received from it; that, while it might be all right as an invest- 

 ment for one's children, the one who planted it could not expect to 

 get much out of it ; and this feeling has been heightened and strength- 

 ened here in the east by the records of small family orchards, set years 

 before the orchard was thought of as a serious business proposition, 

 and which without any care whatever hcuve taken a long tiine to come 

 into bearing. 



2. We are so largely a suburban community here in New Eng- 

 land that truck crops and dairying have been profitable; and once 

 these branches were started, they naturally kept in the lead, as 

 farmers are proverbially conservative and slow to change into new 

 lines. 



3. There has too long been a feeling here in the east that we could 

 not compete with the west in any line of agriculture. When grain 

 crops were the main feature of farm operations, and when the grain 

 States of the middle west were first opened up, it ivas a one-sided 

 fight; and our eastern farmers came to feel that anything which the 

 western farmer could produce he was bound to win on, and they have 

 therefore the more assiduously stuck to truck and dairying, where they 

 were safe from that competition. But just as at the "National Corn 

 Show " last year it was a young man from Connecticut who took the 

 prize for the highest yield of corn per acre in the United States, and 

 who is now giving pointers and selling seed corn to his western com- 

 petitors, so I believe that if the eastern orchardists will only try it, 

 they can as fully and easily upset the notion that the west has an 

 absolute and iron-clad lead in the production of apples. 



Next to the question of land, and more important in some ways, I 

 should place the matter of the quality of New England-grown fruit, 

 I believe that there is no other section where the flavor and aroma and 

 juiciness and sweetness, and, in fact, all those factors on which we base 

 our estimate of the quality of an apple, are more highly developed 

 than right here. This is not my own judgment alone, though I have 

 had many opportunities of comparing the fruit from this region with 

 tiiat from other sections, and particularly with the far western apples 



