GETTING INTO THE GROUND 37 



tried to use, but I can be humiliated any day by 

 some spray-sharp who leads me out to the garden, 

 as one did the other day, to show me a thick coating 

 of oyster-shell scale along the limbs of two fine 

 cornuses — ^the red-twigged and the yellow-twigged 

 varieties. 



But I'll keep spraying; I'll spray without ceas- 

 ing ! I can't afford to have any part of my growing 

 garden made a dying garden by these nasty little 

 pests. Later I'll have to spray the fruit trees in 

 bloom for protection against the codlin moth and 

 other predatory bugs, and later again the young 

 fruits on the grapes and apricots and plums for 

 curculio and brown rot and various similar devil- 

 ments. 



On certain March days that have sunned the 

 soil so it can be moved, I want to make sure that 

 my apple, peach, plum and apricot trees, and my 

 cherished red-buds, are free from the hateful 

 borers that like to chew into the young tree trunks 

 right at and under the ground. They have termi- 

 nated the existence of several of the trained dwarf 

 apple trees I was coddling for early fruiting, and 

 every such tree on the place has had a visitation. 

 The only remedy is to dig them out with a knife- 

 blade and a wire-puncher, and keep after them so 

 often that they simply can't get along in peace. 



