56 



silvery-coated one on each side. These latter are flower or 

 fruit-buds. Your object is to encourage them rather than 

 the other, many of which may be rubbed out, but as the 

 trees bear on the last year's wood, provision must be made 

 for fruit-bearing shoots for the next year, to come on in 

 succession. Those buds then which are best placed are to 

 be left for this purpose while you are disbudding the re- 

 mainder. 



Major Downing, the veteran American pomologist, gives 

 directions for peach-pruning in a similar strain. He says : 



" If the trees are left to themselves, the growth is mostly produced 

 at the end of the principal branches, and the young shoots formed in 

 the interior of the head die out. The consequence is that the head 

 is filled with long lean branches provided with young shoots 

 only at their extremity. Anyone can see that such a tree can only 

 possess half the number of healthy bearing shoots that it would have 

 had if filled throughout with vigorous young wood. The sap flows 

 tardily through the long rigid branches and there are not half enough 

 leaves to secure the proper feeding of the fruit. Such fruit as there 

 is comes at the ends of the branches which often break under the 

 awkwardly placed weight. Instead of this we substitute the shorten- 

 ing in method of pruning. As early as may be the work begins, i.e., 

 cutting back half the last year's growth over the whole of the tree. 

 As the average is from one to two feet we shall take off from 6 to 12 

 inches. It need not be done with precise measurement ; indeed the 

 strongest shoots should be shortened back most in order to bring up 

 the others, and any long projecting limbs that destroy the balance of 

 the head are cut back to uniform length. This brings the tree into a 

 well rounded shape. By reducing the young wood to one half, we 

 apparently reduce the coming crop one half, so far as number of 

 fruits is concerned. But the remaining half, receiving all the sus- 

 tenance the tree has to give, come to double the size. The young 

 spurs which start abundantly from every part of the tree keep it well 

 supplied with bearing wood for next year, and the greater size and 

 luxuriance cf the foliage, as a necessary consequence, produce larger 

 and more highly flavoured fruit. Kemember, in shortening back, to 

 cut to a wood-bud for the finish of each shoot. Else you may have fruit 

 coming out at the very tip, unsheltered by leaves and certain to drop 

 early or come to nothing."* 



It is scarcely possible to avoid sayiug something' upon 

 the subject of what is known in the United States as Peach 

 Yellows, and about which there was recently a scare in the 

 'Colony, contemporaneous with the spread of American 

 Pomological literature among us. Seeing that one of the 

 acutest practical investigators, Erwin P. Smith, utterly 



* Fruit and Fruit Trees, pp. 584, 086. 



