THIRTY-THIRD BIENNIAL SESSION 
103 
SOME OF THE PROBLEMS THE PRACTICAL ORCHARDIST MUST 
MEET. 
S. H. Fulton, West Virginia. 
Each year in the course of his operations the practical orchardist must 
meet a great variety of problems. Many of these problems have confronted 
fruit growers) for years, others are new and constantly changing. It will 
be the purpose of this paper to discuss only a few of these problems relating 
mainly to the four principal operations essential to the development and up 
keep of an orchard, namely : pruning, spraying, fertilizing and cultivating, to- 
gether with a few statements relative to the labor problem and the all im- 
portant question of marketing the crop. The problems surrounding these 
various operations will be discussed in about the order in which they receive 
attention from the orchardist during the course of the year and the ideas 
presented will be suggested largely by the personal experience of the writer. 
The beginner in orcharding will be confronted, early in his career, with 
the question of when and how to prune his trees. Under certain conditions 
experienced growers are at a loss to know how to proceed. For this latitude, 
late winter and early spring is the time commonly accepted as the best for 
general pruning, which consists in thinning and shaping the tops of the 
trees. However, if the orchard is extensive in size or the grower is short 
of help it may become necessary to prune during the winter months in order 
that the work may be gotten out of the way before spraying and other 
spring work commences. Pruning in late winter or early spring is probably 
best for the trees as the shock appears to be less and it is then only a short 
time until the sap commences to circulate and the wounds begin to heal. 
However, with moderate pruning of peach and apple trees, we have dis- 
covered no ill effects worthy of mention from pruning at any time during 
the winter when the temperature throughout the day does not stand 
more than a few degrees below the freezing point. Very young trees 
and old trees which are to be severely pruned should be left until the coldest 
winter weather is past. Following the big freeze of January 13 and 14, 
1912, when the temperature in our locality dropped twenty to twenty- 
five degrees below zero, killing all the peach buds and blackening the wood, 
it became necessary to give our bearing peach trees a severe pruning in 
order to rejuvenate them and enable them better to overcome the winter 
injury. A few hundred trees were pruned .'in mid-winter, shortly after the 
freeze. These trees did not do well, in fact some of them died outright. 
The main body of the orchard was pruned in early spring after the severe 
freezing weather was over. These trees came through well making a good 
growth of new wood with heavy dark green foliage. The next season which 
was the one just closed, these trees produced a good crop of fine fruit. It 
was our purpose, in this pruning, to trim moderately; just severely enough to 
induce the trees to make a strong growth and not to such an extent as to 
endanger the life of the trees or induce a rank growth of wood with few 
fruit buds, thereby destroying prospects for a crop the following year. 
