MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS. 
14a 
whatever of good there is in any system or regulation, and nursery inspec- 
tion and the inspector’s certificates are no exceptions. As in everything else,, 
the earliest efforts were more or less crude and unsatisfactory, but as I have 
said, each year renders the certificate of inspection more accurate and reliable 
and it is to be hoped that nurserymen will see to it that no act of theirs shall 
detract from its reliability and usefulness. 
Lastly, we must not forget that all the while we are, to a certain degree,, 
setting the standard of foreign inspection and certification, and therefore 
foreign as well as domestic certificates of nursery inspection will be what the 
better and more reliable class of nurserymen make them. 
THE RUSSIAN REMEDY FOR ROOT KILLING OF APPLE TREES. 
BY PROF. N. E. HANSEN, SOUTH DAKOTA AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE,. 
BROOKINGS, SOUTH DAKOTA. 
The past winter has wrought widespread destruction in the northwestern 
nurseries and young orchards and the afflicted area extends far to the south.. 
Hundreds of thousands of apple root grafts have been root-killed,, and the 
tales of woe come from very many localities even in Missouri. The winter 
of 187-2-73 will long be remembered by fruit men for devastation wrought,, 
the winter of ’84-5 was another, and now that of ’98-99 is added to the list. 
At Brookings we find apple root-grafts root-kill every winter unless deeply 
covered. Nearly six thousand were root-killed in the winter of 1896-7. Root- 
grafts that had made a good growth in 1897 were taken up' in the fall of 1897 
and wintered in cellar. Root-grafts made in the winter of 1897-8 were planted 
at the same time in the spring of 1898. Both lots root-killed. In all hardy 
varieties we find the scion alive and sound, but the American seeding root 
dead. Both Vermont apple and French crab seedlings root-killed. The Hiber- 
nal and other hardy varieties had not rooted sufficiently from the scion to 
carry the tree through; indeed, the past winter the scion roots of all (even 
Hibernal and Duchess) of the cultivated varieties winter killed. So that 
“trees rooting from the scion” will not be hardy enough in winters like that of 
1898-9. Several hundred seedlings were grown in 1896 from seed of wild 
crabs gathered near DesMoines, Iowa, but all but one plant were killed the 
first winter. A similar number of French crab seedlings were planted in 
the spring of 1898, but not a solitary plant survived the past winter. Will 
the experience of the past winter change nursery methods? Probably very 
little, except in the northern nurseries. Commercial methods change slowly, 
and the test winters do not come often enough to compel a quick changing. 
Certain it is that the western American method of winter root-grafting makes 
possible the production of apple trees at prices lower than those of Europe 
with cheap labor. 
Let us make a flying trip to the largest empire in the world, Russia, a 
country containing one-seventh of the earth’s surface. We will find that 
the growers in the northern fruit-growing regions have had the same trouble 
with root-killing, that our tale of woe was theirs also years ago, but that 
they have met and solved the problem and are now masters of the situation. 
In 1894, with the kindly assistance and advice of my teacher, Prof. J. L. 
Budd, the writer visited the Imperial Agricultural College at Moscow, Russia, 
and in 1897 the visit was repeated when sent on a tour of exploration by Hon. 
