Chapter 37

The horticultural societies of Iowa and Nebraska joined in an automobile tour of the orchards, vineyards, nurseries, and truck farms August 2 to 4. The first day was spent in and around Council Bluffs. Interest centered around the large Co-operative Grape Growers' Association. A grand picnic dinner was served by the ladies. This association has been in active operation for fifteen years. Professor Beach emphasized the value of the work that is being done, and especially the value of having a contented lot of people in a community mutually interested in one kind of work. On the return trip a stop was made at the experimental apple orchard that is conducted by the Horticultural Department of the Iowa State College. This orchard of 900 trees was leased in 1910 for ten years to determine if an old orchard that has been unprofitable could be made profitable. Careful records have been kept of expenses and of the size and grade of all fruits produced under the several soil treatments. To date six crops have been harvested from the 475 trees under experiment. The lowest was 1,700 bushels in 1911 and the largest was 6,000 bushels in 1915. It is estimated that there is about thirty per cent. of a crop on the trees this year. Demonstrations were given in spraying, dynamiting trees, treating trees affected with blister canker, and grading apples with a large grading machine.

The second day was spent in orchards near Omaha. Some excellent orchards that have been very profitable were visited. It had been very dry in that region, consequently the fruit was undersized.

The third day was spent in southwestern Iowa, from Hamburg to Glenwood. It is impossible to tell about all the good things seen on this trip. We saw all kinds of pruning, cultivated and "sod cultivated" orchards and, above all, corn, corn and more corn. At Shenandoah the nurserymen and seedsmen took charge of the party and entertained all in a very hospitable manner. There were ninety at the noon banquet. In the afternoon they showed us the large nurseries and seed warehouse.

Toward the end of the trip we stopped at a 40-acre orchard, mostly Grimes Golden. A hailstorm had injured the fruit very much.

One of the great lessons gained from the 150-mile automobile tour was the fact that _spraying_ is _one_ of the _most important orchard operations_. It was interesting to hear what some of the older orchardists would say when they saw fruit injured by scab. It is an important matter with them, because it means dollars to have disease-free fruit to market.

While it is not the intention to publish anything in this magazine that is misleading or unreliable, yet it must be remembered that the articles published herein recite the experience and opinions of their writers, and this fact must always be noted in estimating their practical value.

THE MINNESOTA HORTICULTURIST

Vol. 44 OCTOBER, 1916 No. 10

Camping on the Yellowstone Trail.

CLARENCE WEDGE, NURSERYMAN, ALBERT LEA, MINN.

I suppose that civilization is the correct thing for mortals to aspire to. As a boy, while I hated it with a bitter hatred, I accepted it as inevitable because my elders approved it and because it seemed indissolubly linked to the school, the church and the things of good repute. As I grow older the yoke sits easier on my shoulders, but doubts have increased as to its necessary connection with the good, the true and the beautiful. It surely kills the sweet virtue of hospitality. In my home church lately there was a call for volunteers to entertain a visiting delegation, and I was interested in observing how perfectly the number that might be accommodated in any home was in inverse ratio to the size and furnishings of the house. High heeled shoes and hobble skirts, two-story starched collars and tile hats are fashion signs of civilization, but I cannot see why a ring in the nose and a tattooed arm might not have answered just as well. I am getting harder to convince that a broad foot, shaped on the lines laid down by the Creator, is less beautiful or desirable than the one-toe pointed shoe, decreed just now by our particular brand of culture, and today I would as lief defend the cult of the simple red man as the savagery that disgraces the lands across the water.

Whatever the merits of the matter, for one month of the year we and our tent and automobile abandon ourselves to barbarism, and live as we please. This year we chose to spend our month on the Yellowstone Trail, the road that leads from the Twin Cities to the Yellowstone National Park, and which is different from other roads leading in the same direction mainly by its yellow mark, faithfully directing the traveler on his way and preventing the loss of time in getting directions at doubtful cross roads. Our party consisted of a young botanist, and his wife, my wife, myself and our small boy Alan. Our equipment consisted of a tent, 7x7 ft., weighing, stakes, poles, partition and all, 16-1/2 lbs.; a trunk on the running board made to hold bedding and grub box, and an oil cloth to use as a tent floor. Like the Indians we go light, and live the simple life while on the trail. We get off at six o'clock in the morning, eating our breakfast on the move as we get hungry; lunch at noon by the roadside, and camp early, seeking the most interesting spot, from the top of a butte to a pleasant river valley--and cooking the one square meal of the day by such a brushwood fire as we are able to gather.

For the first few days we try to provide some straw to temper the hard earth, but as the days go by, and we get used to roughing it, we sleep soundly with nothing but a blanket and oil cloth between us and mother earth. We pin back the tent door, and with the night wind fanning our faces, close our eyes to the stars and flickering campfire. Some who have never camped are afraid of bugs, snakes and wild animals. We have spent our vacation month this way for twenty-five years, have camped in most of the counties of Minnesota, and in Iowa, the Dakotas and Montana, and have never had but one unpleasant experience of the kind. That was one night when we pitched our tent after dark on the bottoms below Fort Snelling, and did not know till we had laid ourselves down that a colony of ants had pre-empted the spot before us. We did not get much sleep, but we had the comfort of feeling that they were nice, clean, self-respecting, self-defending ants. Would that our experience in hotels had been equally fortunate!

Leaving the western boundary of the forests of Minnesota near Glencoe and going across the prairie and plains to the mountain forests of Montana is an interesting experience. The only trees in Western Minnesota and the Dakotas are those found along the lakes and water courses, and west of the Missouri the trees and shrubby growth, even in such places, becomes very scanty or entirely disappears, giving a weird appearance to one who has always associated water and trees together in his mind. As we draw near the Montana line, trees begin to appear on the tops of the buttes and high bluffs on the distant horizon. Traveling on the railroad I have wondered what they were. With our own private car we satisfied our curiosity by zig-zagging our way up to a camping place among them, the first night they came in sight. Of course they were our old friends, the Ponderosa pine, whose name will always be associated with our grand old man from Nebraska. They ought to be renamed the Harrison pine. How they endure the drouth and cold in a soil so poor that grass withers and dies out, and how they stand erect where every other living thing bows to the bleak winds and blizzards of the prairies, is one of the mysteries of plant life. What a splendid bonfire we made of their boughs that night, flaring as a beacon out over the ocean of prairie about us!

The day before we had passed by hundreds of clumps of a beautiful blue lupine with finely cut foliage and profusion of color that rivaled any flower of its shade I have seen in cultivation. On the way home we gathered a handful of seed from which we shall hope to grow some plants at home. We tried to dig a few to transplant, but their roots seemed to go down, down, till with my short handled shovel, I got discouraged. The herbage of the plains has learned to dig deep for water.

Leaving the Yellowstone at Big Timber and striking across the plains to the Snowy Mountains, we found the Ponderosa pine, and soon the Flexilis pine, wherever a rocky ridge is lifted above the level of the plains, so that these trees were in sight a large share of the time, even far away from large rivers and groups of mountains. If a homestead anywhere in that state is not cozily protected by bright colored evergreens it is not because there is any difficulty in getting trees that will thrive in that soil.

The Snowy Mountains are in the center of Montana, quite unsheltered from the other ranges of the Rockies. It is the meeting place of the flora of the mountains and the plains. I think it is the eastern limit of that peerless tree of the Rockies, the Douglas fir. I gave my impressions of this tree to the society a year or two ago. I am still more in love with it from what I again saw last August in its native Snowy Mountains, and from the bright, sturdy little trees that have been growing at my home in Minnesota for two years past, giving assurance of their willingness to be transplanted to our moister air. It is the coming evergreen for the prairies, and it will be a happy day for all who plant an evergreen west of the natural timber when the Douglas fir has displaced the trees that come from the cool, moist forests of Europe and the sheltered woods of our own lake regions.

I think the Snowys are also about the eastern limit of the little broad-leaved evergreen called the Oregon grape, that I believe every one in Minnesota can grow for Christmas greens. From my first acquaintance with it I got the impression that it required shade, but this time I noted that it was growing all over the bare ridges that radiate from the mountains, wherever it was possible for a little snow to lodge. We can substitute a light sprinkling of straw when snow is lacking. It certainly does not require shade.

The Mariposa lily is a unique flower that springs up in open places and produces a white blossom about the size and shape of the wild morning glory. It grows about a foot high and produces one or two flowers on each stalk. It must have a long period of bloom for ripe seed pods, and blooming plants were common at the same time in August.

The Canadian buffalo berry and a dwarfish birch are two mountain plants of no small ornamental value for the plains. They may not endure the moister air near the Mississippi, but there we have already many useful natives, like the black haw and thorn apple, that are as yet almost unnoticed.

One of the principal charms about the great country traversed by the Yellowstone Trail is its newness and freshness. Millions of acres just as the Indian, the buffalo and the coyote left them--broad stretches as far as eye can reach without a sign of human habitation. But this is fast passing away. Out among the sage brush in land as poor and desert-like as could well be imagined, homes are being mapped out by the thousand, and crops of grain were grown this year that rival the best yield in any of the older states. The time is close at hand when the main highways will be built up and made so hard and smooth that two hundred and fifty miles will be made as easily as our average runs of one hundred and fifty. The way will be safer and speedier, but it will lack some of the spice of adventure, and it will be harder to realize the simple life about the camp fire that now seems to harmonize so well with the wildness of the plains.

The Minnesota Orchard.

A QUESTION AND ANSWER EXERCISE LED BY J. P. ANDREWS, NURSERYMAN, FARIBAULT.

Mr. Andrews: This is a very important subject. We have been talking about it a long, long time, and we have advanced a little, ought to have advanced quite a little more, and this exercise is along the road of improvement in that line. Anything that is bothering us, anything that is in the way of our success with the apple orchard, ask what questions you can, not that I can answer them all, but there are some good orchardists around here that I know I can call on, in case I can not. In this exercise the questions come first, and it is for you fellows to start the ball rolling.

There is one thing we are lacking, that is winter apples. We have enough of fall apples, seems to me, so we can get along very well, but we are looking for something a little better quality than Malinda and that will keep somewhere near as long. All these new seedlings that have been introduced in the past and big premiums offered, they seem to have stopped right there and we are not getting the benefit of but one or two. If they had been adapted to the north, as they should have been, we undoubtedly could have had several good varieties of apples that we could recommend for planting a considerable ways north of here that are good. As it is now we are really looking in this southern part of the country for keeping apples.

I should think if we could get these new varieties of seedlings that are keeping well introduced into the Fruit-Breeding Farm and let Supt. Haralson handle them under number and send them off to the north of us a good ways, we could have them tested. Those that have exhibited these new seedlings and got premiums for them, they ought to be a little more free to get them in some shape so that they will be tested and we will learn their worth. They have their premiums, they got those simply because they are good keepers. Well, now, that isn't anything in their favor for Minnesota planting, not very much. Of course, good keepers, that is a good thing, good quality is another thing, but the first thing is hardiness, and the people who have been drawing these premiums have been seemingly backward in getting them in shape to test. They are afraid to put them out for fear somebody might steal them, but if Mr. Haralson had the handling of them under number nobody could steal them. You have got title to them and control them just as well as when you keep them right on your place where they haven't a chance to show whether they are hardy or not. There is the weak point in this seedling business for Minnesota, I think.

But the apple orchards of Minnesota, if you are not all getting the good results that you want from your orchards, if you are not all getting a full crop, what is the reason? The last year and this year we have failed of getting a good crop of apples or almost any crop, whereas before, ever since the old orchard was planted in 1878, why, we have regarded the apple crop as really a very much surer crop than almost any of the farm crops, but the last two years we have failed to get a crop.

I attribute the poor crop a year ago to such an excessive crop as we had the year before that. Two years ago everything was loaded, breaking down, because we didn't thin them as we ought to, and we could hardly expect very much the next year. This last year, you know we had frosts quite frequent up to about the 10th of June, I think that was the reason we had such a failure this year. Our own orchard is on ground that is about 225 feet above Faribault, so we have got air drainage, and we would expect to escape frosts on that account and have as good a crop as anybody else would in that neighborhood. But that wasn't the case. We didn't get any apples, and yet during county fair why there was quite a nice show of nice fruit that they had picked up a few here and a few there, where really their location seems to me could not have been any better than ours. I don't know what the reason was, but it was very patchy, and I didn't dream we would have such a good show of fruit as we did, and I couldn't tell where it came from.

Mr. Philips: I think when the trees are loaded so heavily, if you would pick off a third of them you would get more out of the balance of the crop.

Mr. Andrews: Yes, I think that. The question is, if we pick off a third of a heavy crop, if we have a heavy crop, if that wouldn't help the next crop. It surely would.

Mr. Philips: Help that crop, too, in the price.

Mr. Andrews: Yes, sir, it will pay that year besides paying the next year, too; it will pay double.

Mr. Philips: It is a good plan any year.

Mr. Andrews: Yes, we ought to do that, we are lacking in that work of thinning the fruit. We sometimes have a late frost that will take off part of them, thin them that way, or wind, or something of that kind, and we rather depend on that feature of it. Then in that time of the year we are very busy and liable to have some things neglected, and that seems to be the one that is almost always neglected.

Mr. Brackett: Would you advocate the extensive planting of apples in this climate?

Mr. Andrews: I would not. At the same time you take it in the southern part of the state I presume they can grow them there. They can grow there many things we can't think of growing in this part of the state unless it be along Lake Minnetonka.

Mr. Older: Where you have an orchard ten years old, is it best to seed it down or still continue to cultivate it? In the west they have to cultivate. What is the best in this country? I know one man says it is best to keep on cultivating while it is growing, and another man says that that will kill the trees. I want to know which is the best.

Mr. Andrews: I think cultivation is the thing that ought to be done until the trees get well to bearing, anyway, and then it furnishes nitrogen to the soil to seed it down to clover. If we don't do that we are very liable to neglect that element in the soil. The better way to my mind is to cultivate for eight or ten years, and then I do think it is all right perhaps, for farmers, I mean, who will neglect the cultivation if they depend on it. That is, if they make up their minds it is better to cultivate than it is to seed down, their trees are more apt to be neglected. During the busy part of the season they won't cultivate as constantly as they ought to. If they would do that I have not much doubt but what cultivation would be all right right along, if you will furnish that nitrogen that ought to be in the soil for the protection of the crop. Clover is the easiest way to get that, and the trees will be more sure to have the benefit of that if you sow to clover and grow a crop of hay and turn it under, possibly let it be into clover two years, but turn that under and cultivate for two or three years and then put into clover again. I think that would be preferable for the farmer, for the farmer especially, than it would to undertake to either cultivate all the time or seed down all the time.

I don't believe it is a good thing to seed down where there are young trees growing and while the orchard is young. If you will plant your potatoes in that orchard between the rows and cultivate it, you will do the cultivating. I haven't got very much faith in the average farmer--I don't mean you horticulturists--but the average farmer. If he will plant trees and you advise him to cultivate them while they are young, they will be neglected after the first year or so. He may while the fever is on, he may cultivate them one year and the next year about half cultivate them, and the following years they will grow up to grass and weeds. Whereas, if he plants potatoes he gets just the right cultivation for the trees if he cultivates the ground enough to get a good crop of potatoes. Then in the fall when he digs the potatoes he loosens up the ground, and it takes up the moisture, and after the fall rains they go into winter quarters in good shape. It seems to me that is as near right as I could recommend.

Mr. Hansen: What distance apart ought those apple trees to be?

Mr. Older: Another question along that line. Suppose we concede that a young orchard ought to be cultivated until it gets eight or ten years old, then which is the best when you seed it to clover to cut the clover and throw the hay around the trees for a mulch or just take the hay away, or what?

Mr. Andrews: I think it would be better to put the hay around the trees for mulching. If the hay is used and the barnyard manure is taken to the orchard that would fill the bill pretty well.

Now, the distance apart? Grown trees really need about thirty feet apart each way. If you run the rows north and south and put them thirty feet apart, and sixteen feet or a rod apart in the row, with a view to taking out every other tree, you might have to go under bonds to take them out when they are needed to come out (laughter), or else you would leave them there until you hurt your other trees. If you would take out every other tree when they get to interfering after several years, eight or ten years, you can grow a double crop of apples in your orchard, but if you do the way you probably will do, leave them right there until they get too close, you will--

Mr. Hansen: Spoil all of them?

Mr. Andrews: Yes. Then you better put them out a little farther apart, and, as I said, two rods apart each way I don't believe is too far. Our old orchard that we put out in 1877 is just on its last legs now. At that time, you know, we didn't know anything about what varieties to plant, we didn't have as many as we have now. The old orchard only had the Duchess and Wealthy for standards, and half of the orchard was into crabs, because I thought at that time crabs was the only thing that would be any ways sure of staying by us. Well, those trees are about through their usefulness now, the standards. They have borne well until the last two years, generally loaded, and they were put out at that time fourteen feet apart each way, breaking joints so that they didn't come directly opposite. And when they got to be twelve or fifteen years old, it was difficult to get through there with a team or with any satisfaction, it was rubbing the limbs too much. Then the next orchard we put out on the farm was twenty-four feet by fifteen or sixteen feet in the row, the rows twenty-four feet apart. I wish they were a little farther apart, although that hasn't bothered very much about getting through between the rows, but it shows that a tree that is any ways spreading in its habit really needs about two rods each way. Are there any other questions?

Mr. Brackett: Do you think a Wealthy orchard under thorough cultivation, making a rank growth, do you think it is as hardy as an orchard seeded down, and do you think that a Wealthy orchard would blight more than other kinds?

Mr. Andrews: If the ground is rich and under thorough cultivation it does tend to cause fire blight. I haven't followed it on anything but young orchards. When they have commenced to bear then we have generally seeded down and turned in the hogs, and we have rather neglected the cultivation after that. I do think that if we had cultivated a little more often it would have been better.

Mr. Older: What do you consider the best to seed down with, clover or alfalfa?

Mr. Andrews: I have never tried alfalfa. I don't see why it wouldn't be all right, if you don't try to keep it too long. It would furnish the nitrogen all right.