Part 20 (2/2)

In this matter of spraying and spraying materials, if we go back in history--we have to look for truth wherever we find it, whether it comes from low or high sources. As a matter of fact thieves and sheep ticks and ignorance are largely responsible for our spraying and the spraying materials of today. It doesn't sound very well in a scientific body to talk that way, but truth is truth wherever you find it, whether it comes from the university professor or from the farmer. If we recognize truth, from whatever source it comes, then we are open-minded and can take advantage of things that will be greatly to our benefit.

In the matter of spraying materials: They were discovered through accident, in an effort to prevent thieving in the vineyards of Bordeaux, France. It seems that workmen on the way to their places of employment were in the habit of foraging on the vineyards of the farmers along the way. To prevent that some of the fruit growers conceived the idea it would be a good thing in order to scare them to get blue vitriol and mix it with water and spray it on the fruit along the roadside. Later in the season, very much to their surprise, they found that the grapes that were treated in that way were not affected with the brown rot. So they tried it again to see whether they were right about that being the cause, and it wasn't long before they used it for that purpose. They stopped the thieving, but they also discovered a scientific truth, that the Bordeaux mixture was a fungicide and that fact has been of immense value to the world since then.

When the San Jose scale came into this country from the west, some man who had used sheep dip for sheep ticks, said: ”If it is a good thing against sheep ticks, why isn't it good against this little vermin they call the San Jose scale?” He tried it on the trees, and he found that it was an effective remedy for the San Jose scale. So we have lime-sulphur today as one of the spray materials in very common use.

Among other things the scientists told us we couldn't use lime-sulphur and a.r.s.enate of lead together, that they would have to be sprayed over the orchard in separate sprays, that is, we would have to go over the orchard with lime-sulphur and then again with a.r.s.enate of lead, that when you combined the two the chemical combination was such that it deteriorated the lime-sulphur. Some farmer who didn't know about that scientific proposition determined to put them both on together, and he found that it not only worked all right but that the two were really more effective when combined than if put on separately. So you see it was thieves, sheep ticks and ignorance that are responsible for three of our most successful ways of spraying at the present time.

Now, scientific men have come in and given us a great deal of information along various lines in regard to spraying, and I don't decry science in any sense at all. These men, while they were not scientifically educated, discovered scientific truths, and it is truths we want after all.

Just what your position on this spraying proposition is here in Minnesota, whether you have commercial orchards up here or not, I have not been able to discover. I presume that your plantings here are very largely that of the farmer and amateur rather than the commercial orchardist. In Illinois we have our large commercial orchards, and we have gotten beyond the question of whether it pays us to spray or not.

For a man to be in the commercial apple business in Illinois and not spray means that he doesn't accomplish very much and his product doesn't bring him any profit.

Now, whether you spray commercially or whether you spray for your family orchard in an amateur way, it doesn't matter so far as the spraying is concerned--you should spray in either case. If you have a community where you have few orchards and they are small, it behooves you to get together and buy a spraying outfit, combine with your neighbors and buy a good spraying outfit, and then have some man take that matter up who will do it thoroughly in that neighborhood and pay him for doing it. In that way, if you hire it done, it doesn't interfere with your farming operations and gets your spraying done on time. I have noticed this with stockmen and with grain farmers, men who are not directly interested in fruit but combine it with their regular business, that they consider fruit growing a side line and such a small part of their business that they usually neglect it altogether. In the matter of the spraying they keep putting it off until tomorrow. When the time arrives for spraying you must do it _today_ and not put it off until tomorrow.

Time is a very essential element in spraying. To give you an ill.u.s.tration: A few years ago, in spraying a Willow Twig orchard, consisting of eighteen rows of trees, I sprayed nine rows of those trees, or about half of the orchard, we will say, the first part of the week, the first two days. And then there came on a two or three days'

rain, and the balance of those eighteen rows was sprayed the very last of the week or the first of the following week. The two following sprayings went on just at the right time for them, but when it came to the harvesting of that crop the trees that were sprayed first, that were sprayed immediately after the bloom fell, produced 175 bushels of very fine No. 1 fruit, free from scab, while the other nine rows, equal in every respect so far as the trees are concerned and the amount of bloom there was, produced seventeen bushels of No. 2 fruit, no No. 1 fruit at all.

The Willow Twig is one of those varieties that is very susceptible to scab, and of course this is a marked ill.u.s.tration of what happens if you don't spray at the right time. Notwithstanding the fact that the nine rows, the last ones, I speak of, were sprayed with the two following sprays at the same time that the other part of the orchard was sprayed, the results were entirely different because the first spraying, which was really the important one so far as the scab is concerned, was not put upon the tree at the right time.

The scab fungus, which seems to appear on your apples out here, is one of the most insidious diseases we have in the whole fruit industry. I think that scab fungous disease is probably the one that affects you the most. Now, scab fungus will not be noticed particularly in the spring of the year. The time that those spores are most prevalent, the period of their movement as spores in the atmosphere and the lodging upon the fruit, is right at the beginning, right about the time of the blossoming or immediately following. For a period of about two weeks at blooming time and after is the time that you have that condition.

And the trouble is--it is just like typhoid fever. You let typhoid fever get into a family, and they do not think anything of it except to take care of the patient properly if he has it, but it doesn't scare the neighbors, it does not interest them. But let the smallpox break out in a community, and everybody is interested and scared to death for fear they are going to get the smallpox.

Well now, as compared with things of a fungous nature, the scab is a good deal like typhoid fever. The latter is insidious and it will destroy more--I take it there are more people die in the United States of typhoid fever every year than die of smallpox, ten to one. I haven't the statistics but I have that in mind, that it is a fact that they do, and yet there isn't half the fuss made about typhoid fever that there is about smallpox.

Now, that is so about the scab fungous disease. In Illinois, to ill.u.s.trate, we have what is called the bitter rot fungus in the southern part of the state. If any one has the bitter rot they are scared to death, they think they are suffering untold misfortune. The bitter rot attacks the apples when nearly grown. The ground is covered with the rotted apples, and you can see them in the trees, but this little bit of scab fungus, they do not seem to notice that.

The reason is this, that scab comes from very minute spores that appear upon the apples in May or June, and as the summer advances they spread more and more. It depends, of course, upon the amount of moisture there is present, but it begins its work when the apples are very small. If it gets upon the stem of the apple it works around the stem and the apple drops off, and you have apples dropping from the time they are the size of peas until the very last of the fall, and while it looks in the month of June as if you are going to have a good crop of apples when it comes harvest time your crop has diminished greatly or to nothing, and you wonder where it has gone. With this scab fungus they just keep dropping, dropping, all through the season; whenever you have a little rain or wind these apples that are affected will drop off. You don't notice them very much because they go so gradually, one at a time or so, and you don't notice you are having any particular loss until it comes fall, and you find that your crop is very small.

That is why I say, you should wake up to the fact that it is necessary for you to spray if you are going to have perfect fruit and plenty of it--and I doubt not you could increase the amount of fruit you have in the State of Minnesota by ten times in one year by simply spraying your orchards thoroughly at the proper time with fungicide.

To do this, as I said, you must have a spraying outfit, individually or collectively, in your neighborhood, and if you get one individually you can take the contract to spray your neighbor's trees, if you wish, and get back enough to pay you for the outlay. If you have only a few trees and you have some one who understands it, you could just as well spray a few other orchards in the neighborhood and get your spraying done for nothing in that way, charging them enough to cover the cost and enough for some profit. That is done in some sections and is a very satisfactory way.

The only way, however, that I would do this, if I were you, would be to enter into a joint arrangement of not less than five years, because if you do it from year to year, if a man has good fruit one year, he may say, ”I guess I don't want to go to that expense this year; I will drop that.” You know how it is. If you make a contract for five years then you can make your plans accordingly and get your material and your spraying outfit and everything. I wouldn't trust to a one-year plan because they get ”cold feet,” as the saying is, after the first year, and perhaps they have not noticed any great advantage and they back out, but if they keep it up five years they wouldn't be without it.

In a small way it isn't necessary to have a high power, high pressure engine to do this spraying with. A _good_ hand pump, as they make them now, has a very efficient force in applying this spray. It is not the force with which the spray material is applied that makes it effective, so much as it is the thoroughness with which it is done. You have to do a thorough job. In spraying you are providing insurance for your apple crop. That is just what it means, and not to spray is like doing without fire insurance on your buildings. You do that, not because you want fire, but you are doing it for protection, you are going to be on the safe side. You are doing like the darkey woman when she was about to be married. She had been working as cook, and the day came for her to be married. That morning she brought a roll of bills down to the boss. She said: ”Mr. Johnson, I wish you would keep this money for me. I's gwine to be married.” He said: ”Is that so? But why do you come to me with this? I should think having a husband you would have him take care of it for you.” She said: ”Lord a' ma.s.sy. Do you think I was gwine to have that money around the house wid dat strange n.i.g.g.e.r there? No, sir.”

(Laughter.)

That lady was taking the precaution of being on the safe side, and that is what we do when we spray our orchards, we are going to be safe.

There are a great many kinds of spraying materials. There is the bordeaux, one of our best fungicides, but we find in Illinois that it also, while it is a good fungicide, has the effect sometimes of burning the fruit if the weather conditions are just right. If you have pretty fair weather conditions up here and don't have too much rain, you probably would not get your fruit affected too much, and if you are not growing it for market it doesn't matter so much because all it does is to russet the fruit. It doesn't do any particular harm except when the scab fungus is especially bad, for then it does injure the foliage more or less. On the whole, in Illinois, we are using the lime-sulphur in preference to the bordeaux, and our commercial orchard growers there have completely abandoned the bordeaux except for bitter rot fungus or blotch fungus, which comes late in the season. The spray just before the bloom is a very important one for the scab fungus. After you can see the pink of the bloom on the trees as they begin to look pink, before the blossoms open, put on your lime-sulphur, or you can use bordeaux mixture at that time if you prefer it, without injury to your fruit.

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