^he RURAL. NEW-VORKER 
1297 
' ■ - ~ 
RURALISMS 
A Story of Misfit Trees 
From my own experience I wish to 
point out to the inexperienced in horti¬ 
culture one very common cause for serious 
•Hsappointment. Ten years ago I set out 
ii home orchard of 25 apple trees, planned 
to be not more than two of any one va¬ 
riety. When they came to bearing, 12 of 
them turned out to be Nero, an apple I 
had never heard of before and of very 
inferior quality. The rest of the lot con¬ 
tained some I had ordered and some not 
ordered. 
In 1910 I decided to set a small com- 
(uercial apple and peach orchard, and. 
that I might avoid serious mistakes, I 
employed a noted agricultural expert to 
inspect my farm and advise me, for 
which I paid him $50. I «l)OUght the trees 
he advised from the nurseryman he rec¬ 
ommended. On this nurseryman’vs price 
list is this statement: “Stock guaranteed 
true to name. ‘If you order a Baldwin 
tree you get a Baldwin tree, and don’t 
find, four years from planting, that you 
hav'e something else.’ ’’ He wrote me, 
“We w’ant to be in shape to give every 
planter the pedigree of every variety of 
fruit he buys of us, so that if desired he 
can personally inspect the parent trees 
and see and taste the kind of fruit they 
produce.* * * * x wdll personally 
make the.se selections,’’ referring to ray 
order. 
I now present this list as ordered and 
as the trees came labelled, ■with the re¬ 
sults since the trees came into hearing, 
in most instances verified by the Bomol- 
ogist of the V. S. Department of Agricul¬ 
ture : 
< >rdered 
20 Duchess 
10 Cl raven stein 
10 Spy 
10 Rhode Island 
10 McIntosh 
20 Wealthy 
20 Wagener 
2 Knickerlmcker 
4 Cox Orange 
2 Twenty Ounce 
4 Sutton 
1 Fall Strawberry 
Result 
14 Duchess, >2 Fa- 
meuse 
0 Gravenstein, 1 
^Vealthy, 8 Rein- 
ette Grise 
OSpy (so far), 1 
Ben Davis 
9 Rhode Island 
10 McIntosh 
12 Wealthy, 8 Ram- 
bo 
14 Wagener, 2 Gide¬ 
on, 1 Baldwin, 1 
Ontario, 1 Fa- 
meuse, 1 unknown 
0 Knickerbocker, 1 
McIntosh 
0 Cox Orange, 4 
Ben Davis 
0 Twenty Ounce. 1 
McIntosh 
0 8utton, 4 Yellow 
Transparent 
0 Fall Strawberry, 
1 Alexander 
8ixty-six trees true to name out of 97 
living! Some have died, and a few, pos¬ 
sibly Spys, have not yet borne. The mi.s- 
fit trees are all undesirable and must be 
top-worked. In addition. Duchess has so 
far proved very undesirable here. aJid 
Wagener is a little in doubt. I wish they 
were all Rhode Island, McIntosh and 
M'lealthy. 
My peaches 1 ordei’ed from one of the 
best-known growers in America, and, for 
reasons unnecessary to explain, the selec¬ 
tion of part of the varieties was left to 
him. lie sent me 15 Red Bird and 40 
Krummel’s October, varieties that are 
absolutely worthless here. 
From my agricultural expert and the 
two nurserymen I have had letters of 
’ sympathy in mv affliction, and more or 
less lengthy explanations as to how such 
mistakes may arise. But there is no 
adequate redress for me, nor can I tell 
others how to avoid these discouraging 
mistakes. Who can tell us how to make 
sure of our varieties? w. C, DEinxe. 
Connecticut. 
Rich Soil on the Seaboard 
I note, on page 1201, a communication 
from Sam Couch, entitled “Corn Crop 
Fertilized by Fire,” referring to the 
growth of stuck corn in Beaufort County, 
N. C. Following Mr. Couch’s discus.sion 
of the method by which this corn is 
grown, there appears a comment by The 
R, N.-Y., from which I quote the follow¬ 
ing .sentence: “It is a wonder that here, 
in America, corn should 4)e thus grown, 
and evidently two or three years would 
exhaust the power of the soil to produce 
crops in this icay *’ We can easily un¬ 
derstand how this statement might be 
made without full knowledge of the con¬ 
ditions w'hich exist in Beaufort and Hyde 
counties, N. O. We w'ere called upon 
two years ago to investigate and report 
on the agricultural possibilities of this 
section, and find that, instead of becom¬ 
ing exhausted after two or three years, 
these soils under proper management tend 
to increase their yields of corn, Soy beans. 
COW' peas, etc. We have photographs of 
corn, cotton and Soy beans on this soil, 
which has been in cultivation for at least 
.30 years, and yields of corn are reported 
up to 50 bushels an acre, on soils that 
have been in cultivation for a half cen¬ 
tury. The truth is that these soils range 
from tw'o to eight feet deep, in black or¬ 
ganic matter, and thoroughly drained and 
cleared give promise of being the basis 
for a wonderfully productive agricultural 
section. We are, at present, making stud¬ 
ies of similar soils running up into Vir¬ 
ginia which promise as well. There is 
no question that this Atlantic seaboard 
are.a contains some of the richest soils in 
the country. edgak i.. smitji. 
New York. 
Notes from a Maryland Garden 
The tomato grow'ers are happy. The 
high i>rices have held up even with the 
increase of the crop above all estimates. 
Recently the canners have paid in tlie 
adjoining county of Dorchester from $1.05 
to $1.25 per five-eighths bushel basket. 
This is the highest price ever known for 
canning tomatoes, and now at the end of 
the first week in October the tomatoes 
are still coming in. In my garden I had 
three separate plantings, the early plants 
forwarded under glass, then plants from 
seed sown in the open ground in April, 
and third plants from seeds sown outside 
the last of May. This last lot of plants 
is now just ripening, and they are full 
of well-grown green tomatoes, which we 
will gather W'hen it is evident that frost 
is at hand. As I write this the wind is 
at the northwest, and it is getting cooler, 
and probably some light frost may be 
expected before long. 
The Narcissus, hyacinth and tulip bulbs 
are in the ground, with the exception of 
the white Roman hyacinths and the Poly¬ 
anthus Narcissus. These have gotten the 
reputation for tenderness mainly because 
if planted early in the Fall they start to 
grow' at once, and of course get hurt. 
But keep them back till the soil is cold, 
and they will remain dormant and come 
on in the Spring. Four years ago we had 
a very severe Winter and the soil was 
frozen W'ell dow'n below’ the bulbs of the 
I’aper IVhite Narcissus, but they came 
through all right. Therefore I plant these 
in December, after the soil has been well 
chilled. 
Down here in our hot sandy soil the 
geraniums that make such pretty beds ia 
the North, are useless for bedding, and 
w’e grow them only in pots or porch boxes. 
But the everblooming Begonias are splen¬ 
did for bedding. .lust outside my office 
door I have a bed of a hundred or more 
that is now and has been all Summer, a 
mass of bloom. I grow’ the plants every 
Spring from seed just as I do tomato 
plants for the garden, except that the 
Begonias are kept in small pots 'in the 
greenhouse till bedding time. They are 
largely Vernon, but with some mixture 
of pink and white varieties. The leaves 
of the red-flowered ones turn a bronzy 
r(‘d in the open sunshine, and this adds 
to the beauty of the bed. They are easily 
grown from seed if the seed are properly 
treated. They are fine as dust, and must 
not be coverf'd with earth. 1 prepare a 
shallow’ box with light and rich soil, sift 
a little dry sphagnum over the surface, 
and w’ater it, and at once sow the seed 
over the surface as thinly as practicable, 
'i’hen a pane of glass is laid on the box 
to keep the soil from drying out fast. 
In a little while the seeds germinate and 
look like green moss on the surf,-ice of the 
soil. 'With careful watering w’ith tepid 
water they grow’ fast and are lifted out 
on the point of a pocket knife blade and 
set in another flat tw’o inches apart, 
where they rapidly increase in size and 
are potted in 2i/^-inch pot.s. The plants 
in the beds seed freely, and it is easy to 
keep up an abundance of seed. In fact 
I give aw’ay thousands <>f the see<I. 
Another good bedding plant is the scar¬ 
let double Zinnia, not the largest kind, 
but the more dwarf of the medium-sized 
ones. I have been for years selecting 
these for a dwarf form and double scarlet 
flowers, and have now got them so that a 
great majority of the flowers are scarlet. 
By eliminating every other color we soon 
get them perfectly true, but one hates to 
makes gaps in a bed, and we get them 
bright enough, 
Scarlet 8alvia we have and breed of 
course. 'We get a far better and longer 
bloom on these here than farther North, 
for they bloom from Junj to frost. Start¬ 
ing with seed of the Zurich variety, and 
constantly selecting for compact and short¬ 
growing plants. I have a strain va.stly 
superior to the ordinary Salvia splendens. 
The lateness of the season in general 
is show'n by the fact that there are still 
flowers on the crape myrtle bushes, r 
rather trees, for Ave have them nearly 20 
feet ■tall. These are the dark carmine, 
nearly crimson. They are usually done 
blooming in September, beginning in late 
Jxily. This year they made a wonderful 
bloom, but did not show’ till August. 
The blooming season is always long, but 
this year the favorable weather has had 
something to do with the lasting of the 
bloom. A lot of Chinese Hibiscus which 
I planted oi>t in the Spring are still mak¬ 
ing their show’y bloom, and one hates to 
leave them to freeze. w. F. massey. 
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It is a simple matter to keep 
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To Li^ht 
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And Barns 
The average size 
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but once in many weeks. 
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w.qtcr 
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The perfect adaj)tability of this service for country home re¬ 
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