Spraying 111 



CHAPTER V 



Spraying 



Fruit growing as a commercial proposition met with 

 its greatest boom with the discovery of effective means of 

 controlling the insect pests and diseases which affected 

 the various orchard crops. It was about the. year 1876 that 

 effective insecticides were discovered, this being through 

 the discovery of the value of Paris green in controlling 

 the potato beetle. Le Baron, the state entomologist of 

 Illinois, made the discovery and suggested at the time that 

 such means would also prove effective in controlling the 

 damages of the canker worm. This suggestion was fol- 

 lowed by an orchardist in New York state, who applied 

 Paris green to his apple trees in the spring of 1878, and 

 at the harvest of that crop he found that the damage from 

 codling moth had also been very materially reduced. In 

 the same year Prof. J. L. Budd used London purple for the 

 same purpose in an orchard in Iowa, finding, as did the 

 New York state orchardist, that there were fewer wormy 

 apples where the spray had been applied than in other 

 parts of the orchard. At first the fruit growers were skep- 

 tical of the value of the means of preventing worminess, 

 so that up to 1885 the practice had been in a purely ex- 

 perimental stage, but thereafter became accepted as the 

 only effective means of preventing the damages of the 

 codling moth. 



The practice of spraying to control fungi had a separate 

 origin. It was discovered by the vineyardists of Bordeaux, 

 France, in an attempt to protect their vines from downy 



