62 STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



FEEDING APPLES TO STOCK. 

 By Charles E. Wheeler, Chesterville. 



In the early part of the present century my great-grandfather in 

 clearing one of the many hillsides of Franklin county set out an 

 orchard of from six to eight acres which in due time came to bear- 

 ing. In after years this orchard fell to my grandfather and was in 

 its prime near the time I came up®n the stage of action. 



I recall those days with pleasure. Such loads of golden fruit! 

 The sweet, the pleasant acid, the bitter sweet, the crimson blushes, 

 the bright russets, such as only can be found in a large orchard of 

 seedling trees, for this orchard was never grafted, and its product 

 had to be used in the many ways common to those earlier days. 

 The product of this orchard in some of the years was counted by 

 the hundreds of bushels besides such fruit as was too soft or too 

 early to be advisable to haul a mile where the new home had been 

 erected. Thus you see that my early days were connected with 

 those who must plan to make use themselves of this large amount 

 of fruit, there being at that time little or no market for the same. 

 To do this many bushels were ground at the old mill, certain kinds 

 were put into the cellar for winter use in the family, and evening 

 after evening spent in preparing the apples for drying, amounting, 

 many seasons, to ten or twelve barrels of sliced apples, while other 

 kinds that had proved good keepers, were placed in bins to be 

 fed to the stock during the long winter. And besides all these, 

 out in the old mill and corn barn were bins holding many big 

 ox-loads to be frozen. I recall with vivid pleasure the eager 

 expectancy of the young stock and tlocks of sheep as they looked 

 for their daily ration of apples. 



Those were boyhood days so full of pleasures and blessed antic- 

 ipations, perchance many of my hearers can look back upon sim- 

 ilar events in their own lives. Times changed and this back farm 

 or "old place" was divided between three brothers, one of which 

 was my father, and I came to know more of the stern realities of 

 work, and work it was, gathering those great trees with their spread- 

 ing branches. But during the winter I felt well repaid as the stock 

 flourished thereon. About this time an effort was made to engraft 

 the trees, but the dry years of the early seventies and that year so 

 well remembered by Franklin county people as caterpillar year 



