68 BOAKD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



handy to take home ; and if the apple men will put their 

 apples in a family package, and make it easy for the people 

 to get them, they will have demand enough ; for now that we 

 have become a nation of fruit eaters, the apple has greatest 

 chance of all. 



We must have in the apple just the same sort of a tree as 

 we have in the peach. The old, long-shanked apple tree 

 nmst go. You can't get to Heaven that way, for you can't 

 spray such high trees. Every apple tree will have to be 

 sprayed thoroughly, and there must be some pruning and 

 some thinning of the fruit every year. The markets are 

 here, the people are here and the money is here, and they 

 want the apples ; but the man that gets that money must 

 thin his apples, and to do this economically he must have 

 low-headed trees. You must get the tree down, so you can 

 look it over to prune it, spray it, thin it. Then you must 

 do another thing, — when your apples are mature, you must 

 pick them as fast as ripe. And as to picking the apples, — 

 you who grow peaches don't go out and strip every peach off 

 the tree at one time ; you go and pick just the ripe ones, 

 and again you go in another few days and find some more 

 that are mature, and so on. Or tomatoes, — the children 

 come in and say, "Mother, a tomato is ripe." Do you go 

 and strip them all ofi", ripe, half ripe and green all at once, 

 or do you let them stay and ripen? No, you don't pick the 

 ripe and green ones together, — not a bit of it. But that is 

 what nearly every man in Massachusetts does with his winter 

 apples, — goes out and cleans them up at one time ; some lay 

 on the ground rotten, and he picks what is left. The man 

 who makes money in the future will pick each set of apples 

 when they are ripe. Somebody says that means work. 

 Certainly ; but there is a fellow right here in Springfield and 

 Boston and everywhere else, who wants to pay you for that 

 work, and he will pay you, and give you the profit on top 

 of it. 



Now, the early apples and the fall apples ma}^ be picked 

 and marketed from day to day. Then come the winter 

 apples, which we must carry for foiu' or five months, and 

 that means harvesting when they mature, and immediately 



