THE NATIONAL NURSERYMAN. 
255 
Cultivation the second year should begin as early as the ground will 
work and continue through the growing season, as before, using more 
horse and less hand work as the trees get larger. 
Pruning the second year should be almost nothing, simply cutting 
back any injured tips to perfectly sound wood and rubbing the buds 
off the bodies from the ground up to where the top is to be formed. 
At the close of the second season the trees will be in nice shape for 
transplanting in the orchard, with a good top one year old, a good 
body two years old and a fine root three years old, that can be lifted 
out with almost the entire roots after the tree digger has loosened the 
soil around them. The trees will stand from three to six feet high, 
depending on the varieties, the season and the care. 
But if these trees are calculated for the market they will have to be 
headed back in the spring and grown a year or two more, for the aver¬ 
age planter wants more timber in his trees. 
During this last year while you are engaged in tree culture you should 
also be cultivating the acquaintance of a tree man to sell them, and if 
you could hear him talk while doing his part of the work you would 
probably feel well repaid, and it may be all you will ever get for your 
four or five years of hard work growing and packing them for him. 
In the discussion which followed J. S. Harris said : “ Gen¬ 
erally a nurseryman starts in with the idea that by using our 
crab seeds for root-grafting stocks, it makes the best stock to 
use for his purpose. I will just cite you one instance. E. S. 
Wilcox, of Trempeleau, Wis., one of the best fruit men in the 
northwest, but who is not now living, got that idea in 1873, 
after that hard winter, and thought the crab was the thing. 
He secured all the crabs he could get hold of and saved the 
seed and went to propagating trees on crab roots. His nursery 
proved a failure, and the originals planted were more or less 
a failure. The crab root is a success for grafting upon it the 
crab cion. The only success Mr. Wilcox met with was with 
the Utter and the Astrachan put upon this root, which grew 
more rapidly than upon the apple root, but after four or five 
years they were all toppled over. The only success he had 
was to graft the crab upon the crab root and top-work other 
varieties upon the branches, and whenever he found varieties 
congenial they were a success. I bought a good many trees 
from Mr. Wilcox on those crab roots, and some of them lived 
for seven or eight years. The crab root to use to make a root- 
graft is not reliable for a great many of our varieties. I 
believe that the road to success—if I lived in Dakota and had 
to have those roots I would make a dwarf tree—but the road 
to success for the general nurseryman is to secure seeds of the 
hardiest varieties as far north as he can secure them, and then 
you will get something into which nature has put the germ of 
a little more hardiness.” 
C. G. Patten (Iowa): “This I consider a very important 
question for the horticulturist of the northwest to consider, 
and as I have had considerable experience along this line I 
wish to rise thus early in your session to say a few words. As 
Mr. Harris has said, and according to my experience has said 
very truly, any one who relies upon the seedlings of the whole 
root of the yellow crab, or any of that type of crab, will meet 
with utter failure. I do not remember whether it was in one 
of the Minnesota papers I made a report a few years ago in 
regard to my work, but I will briefly state it here. After the 
winter of 1872—3, as you know, the roots of our trees were 
terribly killed all over the northwest; and the following 
summer a large quantity of seed of the cherry and large red 
and yellow crabs was planted, and the people planted the seed 
with a great deal of courage. I tried at least seventeen or 
eighteen varieties of the apple, as well as the Hyslop crab and 
one or two others that my memory fails to catch just now, and 
I tried that on a very extensive scale. I grafted the first year, 
I think, at least 30,000. For the first two years many of those 
trees apparently prospered ; they grew more vigorously than 
anything on the common seedling roots, but at three or four 
years old they began to show failure in vigor. The vigorous 
roots succumbed, and on many trees the root was dwarfed to 
a single stem. I tried it for two years, grafting at least 70,000 
crabs ; perhaps not quite as many as that—but the result of 
my experiment was an utter failure. There were a few trees, 
of course, that did better than others, but the result, as a 
whole, as I stated, was a failure.” 
Col. C. L. Watrous (Iowa) : “It seems to me the sum of all 
this is that whoever attempts to try to raise a nursery of apple 
trees on the Siberian pyrus baccata stock, whether it be 
Russian or otherwise, is treading on extremely thin ice, and 
his experiments should not involve more money and time than 
he is able to lose. I have been watching Prof. Hansen’s 
experiments for some time and noted what he put forth in a 
paper that contained many excellent things. One of his state¬ 
ments was that the day of piece root-grafting in the northwest 
was practically obsolete. If we could succeed by his plan 
whereby root-killing could be avoided we could afford to take 
up something new, but if we go into it on a large scale it may 
be at a loss to the nurseryman and to the planter of the trees, 
and it ought to be gone into very carefully and proved in 
some way at the state experiment stations^ and that for a 
number of years, until the matter has been decided, until it 
has been fully decided. There is one thing that has not been 
spoken of here, and that is, that some good success has been 
had in propagating our common apple tree on the crab, on this 
same pyrus baccata, that is grown up to be five or six years 
old. The growth of the current year is used as a scion. Mr. 
Williams, of Nebraska, told Prof. Craig and myself that that 
was the only way in which he had success, and he puts it up a 
foot or two from the bottom of the tree; but he says in his 
experience the one thing you must not fail to do is to allow 
the crab tree to have its own top. If you wish to propagate 
or grow that as a side issue you can do so. If you cut the top 
of the crab and undertake to make a top out of your new 
apple you have organized failure then and there.” 
Prof. Hansen (S. D.) : “To look at the question from the 
standpoint of the whole northwest I think it can be put in this 
way, that in a very large part of the country root-killing comes 
only once in a generation or two, and the people need lose no 
sleep on that account. In Minnesota and the north root¬ 
killing comes oftener, especially along the west line of Minne¬ 
sota, where there is little snow. I here you are forced to 
investigate the subject more closely. 1 hen as you go farther 
north in North Dakota and the northern part of Minnesota, 
root-killing is a factor they have to deal with every winter, and 
then what are you going to do? All the cultivated apple 
stocks that I know anything about kill every winter, seedlings 
and the rest. We have to find something that will stand the 
rigors of that climate, and so far as I can see I do not know 
of anything else to try except the Siberian. With us w r e get 
the very severest freezing when the ground is perfectly dry 
and bare.” ___ 
P. S. Peterson, Chicago, has returned from a European trip which 
lasted a year and a half. 
Edward Payson. A. E. Berry and R. K. Bickford have incorporated 
the Fair Oaks Nursery at Oak Park, Ill., with a capital stock of 
$30,000. 
