154 Report OF THE BOTANIST OF THR 
sarily result from any intentional neglect on the part of work- 
inen, but from the impossibility of always reaching all parts 
of a heavy row without drenching some of the foliage so that the 
liquid will not adhere. In the work for 1899 an outfit was used 
consisting of a barrel pump fitted with two leads of hose and 
requiring three men and a team to operate successfully. With 
this equipment three acres is all that can be sprayed in a day if 
the work be done with any pretense of thoroughness. Further- 
more it was found that for full-grown, heavy asparagus between 
250 and 300 gallons of Bordeaux mixture was required per acre, 
when applied by hand machinery. 
The expense is great in hand spraying, as a team and three men 
are required to spray three acres per day; and the labor involved 
in handling nearly 1,000 gallons of liquid is not slight. The treat- 
ment must be repeated once a week for four or five weeks or 
oftener while the asparagus is growing rapidly; surely not an 
encouraging prospect for asparagus growers who have five acres 
and upwards, and especially for those who grow from forty to 
sixty acres. In fact, with unfavorable weather, those with five 
or six acres would need to devote the major portion of their time 
to asparagus spraying, with a bare possibility of saving 40 per ct. 
of the crop. 
The above factors, combined with the apparent success of our 
work in the fall of 1898 and of 1899, led to the designing and 
building of a power sprayer which it was hoped would do the 
work more thoroughly and rapidly than was possible to do by 
hand, the cost of the machine being a secondary matter. In order 
to secure efficiency the following conditions had to be met: 
For economy in time the apparatus should have a tank capacity 
of at least 250 gallons; it must have a distributing capacity of 
that amount per hour, as a team walking at its normal rate will 
cover an acre of asparagus set in 6-foot rows in that time and 
thorough hand spraying requires 250 gallons of Bordeaux mix- 
ture per acre. The nozzles must be adjustable; as it is often 
desirable to spray the asparagus when small and as the rows on 
different beds are set at varying distances apart, from 4 to 7 feet. 
