Feb. 16, 1914 
Winter Spraying with Nitrates 
439 
Both the row sprayed with nitrate of soda and the check row received 
summer sprayings directed toward the control of apple powdery mildew 
and of codling moth and various other insect pests. While the treatment 
of the two rows was not the same, there was no essential difference in 
the results—that is, the crop loss from codling moth and other insect 
pests did not exceed 1 per cent on either plat and there was no damage 
to the fruit from summer spraying. It is therefore evident that the 
difference which showed up in the crop production of the two rows must 
be attributed to the winter nitrate spraying. 
CROP RESULTS 
The check row of seven trees, which received no winter spraying but 
which was properly protected by summer sprayings, produced 8 loose boxes 
of fruit at picking time. On the other hand, the adjoining row, sprayed 
in February with the solution of nitrate of soda plus lye, produced a 
total of a little over 40 boxes. Thus, the winter nitrate spraying in¬ 
creased the crop production to fully five times that of the unsprayed row. 
Similar adjacent plats, which were winter-sprayed with various crude-oil 
emulsions and soap sprays, produced crops varying from 5 to 9 boxes 
per plat. The single tree which received the 50 pounds of nitrate of 
soda applied as a fertilizer gave no increased production, whereas none 
of the trees in the nitrate-sprayed row failed to respond. 
Regarding the single, heavily fertilized tree, it might be stated that in 
addition to its showing no increase in production, the tree bloomed no 
earlier than normal, there was no improvement in the growth and no 
change in its general appearance throughout the growing season of 1912, 
and in the spring of 1913 it came out normally and not differently from 
the other trees in the same row, being one of the trees in a check plat. 
The tree is still in normal condition and shows no noticeable effect from 
the heavy fertilizing. The orchard is not irrigated, and the rainfall has 
been much less than normal during the last two years. 
Attention might again be called to the conditions under which these 
results were obtained—namely, thrifty-growing trees in a deep residual 
soil and having the characteristic of blooming abundantly each year 
but setting only a shy crop. Even the 40 boxes produced by the nitrate 
spraying does not represent the full crop that such trees should bear, 
but the fourfold increase much more than paid for the cost of spraying, 
and the possibility remains of still further increasing that production by 
similar treatment in following years. 
EXPERIMENTS IN 1913 
The one small experiment on seven trees in 1912 did not furnish suf¬ 
ficient grounds for drawing any general conclusions as to the applicability 
of winter nitrate spraying, but the striking results obtained opened a 
wide field of inquiry. For instance, potash lye was added to the solu¬ 
tion of nitrate of soda in the experiment of 1912, so the questions arise 
as to whether the lye was necessary and whether an acid medium would 
increase or decrease the effect of the nitrate of soda; also, would a 
weaker nitrate solution prove as effective and would other nitrogen-bear¬ 
ing fertilizer materials, such as lime nitrate, lime cyanamid, and sulphate 
of ammonia, give similar results? Following along this line it would 
be interesting to know what effect, if any, the other fertilizer elements, 
