FLORIDA IS TATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 
€3 
rience is that you must go into the peach 
business. 
Dr. Inman-—I would say in regard to 
planting them with orange trees, they 
seem to do equally as well; I have them 
growing where the peach trees are al¬ 
most interlocking over the orange trees, 
and the orange trees are doing finely. 
I have five thousand orange trees and 
five thousand peach trees planted in the 
same forty acres of land. There will be 
two or three poor trees and two or three 
which I may not fertilize alike or may 
not care for alike, all right otherwise. 
Mr. Porcher—Are those the trees that 
have had their tops cut off and have re¬ 
covered? 
Dr. Inman—Yes, sir; and those new 
tops on old trunks stand there now 
twelve or fifteen feet high. 
Walter Cooper—The gentleman re¬ 
ferred to the peaches on the hammock 
land. Now, we know it is a fact that in 
the muck land of Kissimmee the early 
peaches have done remarkably well. I 
have never been in the orchards; I have 
seen photographs of the orchard and of 
the fruit, but a neighbor of mine has 
been over the grove, which was eight or 
ten years of age at that time, and the 
trees were enormous and bearing well. 
There may be some conditions or some 
questions of hammock land that I know 
nothing about. My efforts have all been 
on high pine lands. 
In regard to growing peaches gener¬ 
ally speaking, I say that to do this to-day 
the peach grower has got to tackle the 
business in a systematic manner. That 
he has got to adopt spraying as a part. 
I am certain of it and I did not learn it 
until this winter. I learned it too late 
to profit by it. I am troubled with a 
scale. This is the case where I would 
advise spraying. Of course, I would not 
make a general rule of it, but I believe 
that this work, as far as the peach is con¬ 
cerned, had better be prepared before 
the buds are out. There is a work that 
has been issued by the Department that 
is most comprehensive as applying to 
peaches in cultivation. But since they 
have adopted spraying as a part of their 
business, the result is so satisfactory that 
one cannot help but believe in it. Even 
spray one-half of a tree and it will have 
hundreds of full grown fruit on that half 
and hardly a single sign on the other half. 
I have some trees that I would like to 
spray, but I am afraid to do it. This 
year I lost them on the ioth of February. 
For sick peach trees, Dr. Inman’s rem¬ 
edy, that is, cutting back, is one of the 
best remedies I ever knew of. After the 
freeze of 1899 we had 300 late peaches 
that were injured very badly. The mat¬ 
ter was put in my hands. What would 
you do? I would go in there and saw 
their heads off. I saw one of the hand¬ 
somest groves I ever looked at, about 
400 unproductive trees. I said if they 
were mine I would saw their heads off 
and next spring I would have buds on 
every single tree. 
