LUTHER BURBANK 



Moreover, there are other thousands who have 

 on their farms neglected orchards, run riot with 

 weeds and bringing no monetary return whatever, 

 which might be made the most productive and val- 

 uable portions of the entire acreage. 



And in each case the grafting of the cions of 

 good varieties of fruit on the old and otherwise 

 worthless stock is the key to the entire situation. 

 Old Trees Made Young 



We shall have occasion in the successive chap- 

 ters of the present volume to examine in detail the 

 methods of cultivation and possibilities of im- 

 provement of the different orchard fruits. Here 

 it may be of service to take a brief general view of 

 the subject. And at the outset I wish to emphasize 

 the possibility of making over the orchard mate- 

 rial which is now in hand, so to speak, and which 

 is being so sadly neglected. 



Reports from all over the country tell the same 

 story. In Ohio, for example, according to the re- 

 port of experts of the Agricultural Station, there 

 are thousands of acres of idle orchards. The 

 product of apples — the chief orchard fruit — has 

 fallen to less than a fourth of what it was a gen- 

 eration ago. Apple trees themselves are about 

 half as numerous as they were; and this implies 

 that those that remain are only half as productive 

 as the trees of twenty-five or thirty years ago. 



[40] 



