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NEW ENGLAND FARMER. 



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raising fruit, as many varieties will succeed in any 

 good soil, while others require a light, feathery 

 soil, and will thrive in no other. He condemned 

 the practice of buying trees at auction merely be- 

 cause they had favorite names, and he did not 

 wonder that persons who planted such trees were 

 unfortunate with them. Every man wishing to 

 raise good fruit should select with care, and pay- 

 ing attention to his land, he would find that the 

 influence of the soil wowld much affect the flavor 

 and beauty of the fruit. 



Again, said Col. Wilder, more attention should 

 be paid to the location and aspect of fruit trees, 

 and he thought that on this point many made 

 mistakes in planting the early varieties on the 

 warm and genial soils, whereas the late varieties 

 should have those spots, so as to ripen before the 

 cold nights came on, and the early kinds would 

 ripen just as well from the general heat of the 

 atmosphere, without direct exposure to the sun. 



Col. Wilder said, in closing, that our greatest 

 success must depend on fruit cultivated from 

 seed suited to our own soil, and he would en- 

 courage this as much as he could, so as to have 

 our fruits, like our people, suited to the position 

 they occupy. There was no higher ambition a 

 man should aspire to, as he thought the man who 

 raised good fruit was a benefactor to his race. 



Asa G. Sheldon, of Wilmington, said that he 

 had not much experience in fruit raising gener- 

 ally, but had devoted his attention to raising ap- 

 ples. On the first day of April, 1841, he set out 

 his fruit trees, 158 in number, and his neighbors 

 tried to discourage him from doing so, telling 

 him that he could never succeed on such soil, but 

 he had paid little attention to this, and had con- 

 tinued to set more or less out each year until 

 within the past two years ; he had now 1200 

 trees, and had sold land on which were some 300 

 more. He said there was so much sand under 

 the soil of his town that it drained the land with- 

 out tiles. He raised Baldwins, principally, as 

 he thought they paid as well as any other variety, 

 yielding well and selling well, even when apples 

 were plentiful. While he would not recommend 

 a person commencing a large orchard to plant all 

 Baldwins, he would have him get a good propor- 

 tion of that excellent apple. 



He said that 10 of his best trees, which are 20 

 years old, yielded last year 80 barrels of excellent 

 apples. In the matter of trimming trees he would 

 have a person try a tree each month in the year, 

 and then he would learn from experience the best 

 time to prune. He had found that the best time 

 was from August 15th to September 15th. If, 

 said he, you cut a large limb in July the sap is 

 active, and runs down the tree, and staining the 

 bark, is very apt to kill the tree. If a man had 

 neglected to trim his trees last fall, he would re- 



commend him to do it to-morrow, but he never 

 cut a tree after the blows were off", as it would in- 

 variably injure it. He had had very little expe- 

 rience in pear culture, but he thought it would 

 pay well. 



Mr. Sparhawk, of Brighton, said that a com- 

 mon fault among cultivators was in cutting off the 

 tap root in transplanting young fruit trees ; this 

 root, said he, removes the excrementitious mat- 

 ter, and on being cut off, checks the growth of 

 the tree, and this is plainly seen in the grafts on 

 wild trees, which are found to grow much larger 

 than on trees transplanted from the nursery. 

 He spoke of trees in Brighton 30 feet high which 

 yielded 15 or 16 barrels of apples each per year. 



In relation to pruning trees, he said that when 

 a man raised his own trees he need not use a saw 

 for five years, and then he considered that if 

 properly attended to he could control their growth 

 with the simple use of the jackknife, and this was 

 specially the case with pear trees. Apple trees 

 require some pruning, particularly when from 15 

 to 18 years old. He said he would never prune 

 a tree in the spring, nor in June or July, as then 

 the sap was too lively ; any time after this he 

 thought was safe, but in no case would he ever 

 cut off a limb over an inch in diameter without 

 protecting it, no matter at what time of the year. 

 He spoke of mice gnawing the bark of fruit 

 trees, and said that he remedied this injury by 

 applying the same composition he would to the 

 cut limbs, namely rosin dissolved in oil ; and to 

 neutralize the oil he stirred in whiting and lamp- 

 black. This, he said, excluded the air, and ena- 

 bled the bark to grow underneath, while from the 

 soft nature of the composition the sap would not 

 be checked in its passage from the roots to the 

 tree. Shellac would not do this, and he thought 

 his composition was excellent. 



Speaking of the profits of pear raising, Mr. 

 Sparhawk said that his father had two trees on 

 his estate in Brighton, which had been set out 

 20 years, and he had been in the habit for some 

 years of selling the pears on the trees to a Mr. 

 Gordon, one being a Bartlett and the other a 

 Seckel, and he had received $40 each for their 

 product last year, and about the same amount for 

 previous years, the product of each tree being 

 about the same in quantity. 



Col. Stone, of Dedham, said that reference 

 had been made to the orchard of Mr. Clapp, in 

 Dorchester, by the Chairman, and he had pro- 

 cured a statement of Mr. Clapp's receipts last 

 year from him, which he would read to the meet- 

 ing. Mr. Clapp's orchard embraces 12 acres, but 

 an acre and a half of this was planted with young 

 trees just coming into bearing. He sold last 

 year 875 bushels of currants for $1763 ; 950 bar- 

 rels of apples for S1575 ; 4S0 bushels of peaches 



