gan orchards, by not having a summer cover crop as well as a winter cover crop, and the best summer crop you can have is to let the weeds grow, if you cannot do anything else, and we utilize the weeds as part of our rotation system, as worth as much to us as the clover, not as much as cow peas, but as much as clover. That is a part of our rotation. I think here in the north you need a later summer cover crop in August and September as much as you do a winter cover crop. We do, down with us, and a cover crop for the winter we do not care for specially there as you do here. We are plowing all winter long in the orchard and that winter plowing we use next spring by either planting corn, sowing cow peas or harrowing it down during June and letting it go to weeds or seeding it to clover. I am positive in our orchard problem it is just as necessary to have a rotation in our orchard ground of the crops that grow there as it is for any farmer to follow rotation. I am sure that we can keep up the fertility of our ground in that way. We had some ground in which we planted trees that we cannot grow corn on at all, and that ground, by the turning over of weeds and cow peas is loose and nice and has really good fertility today, so that we have grown our crop of fruit on it this year.

Mr. Reeves: In the neighborhood where I live there are a number of orchards of Baldwins and Rhode Island Greenings and all those old eastern sorts. They were successful orchards, they paid as well as any later orchards that I know of. Now, the owners of those orchards had a system of caring for their orchards; they plowed in the spring, then cultivated a few times during the summer and then from July on let the weeds grow. They laid that down as an established principle. Now, I wonder if we are not going backwards rather than gaining knowledge all these years. That was some forty years ago and those men who grew those orchards were successful. They have varieties that we do not attempt to plant in that same neighborhood now. They kept the ground enriched, I will say that, and that will take the place of rotation.

Mr. Moyle: It seems to me it would be a valuable experiment to be carried on for ten years, taking ten acres of orchard land, five acres to be pastured with sheep, the other five to be under cultivation. Spray the trees and pick the fruit in both orchards, sell it and take the money you get from the sheep for wool and at the end of ten years I am sure the five-acre orchard in which you had the sheep will pay the largest amount of money.

I hope some of the experiment stations will try that experiment for ten years.

Mr. Goodman: Any one plan followed for ten years successively is not the correct plan to follow in my opinion. I would use the sheep and we do use sheep, but it is a part of the rotation in a plan which we follow. We use hogs and let them pasture down for one or two or three years, but to follow the same plan right straight through is just as wrong as it is to cultivate very thoroughly during the whole of the season, which is wrong.

Mr. Bingham: We start in the early spring and cultivate until about the time the fruit is ready to harvest. We suspend cultivation during the harvesting and then begin and cultivate once or twice more in the fall. Some of us have not been practicing having a cover crop any more than what amounted to weed growth from the time of cultivating to freezing up.

Mr. Goodman: Don't you get quite a little covering of weeds?

Mr. Bingham: We get a covering of weeds that covers the ground entirely.

Mr. Goodman: Well, that is right.

Mr. Rowe: We have one or two men, three men perhaps, in our county that have been able to grow apples that were just enough finer than the apples grown by any other person to get from two to three times as much per bushel as the other fellows were able to get and we have been observing their methods somewhat. One man, Mr. Charles Wilde, last year, when apples were cheap, was able to get at his own place seven miles out of the city from $1.25 to $2.00 a bushel from the best grocerymen; they came out and got them; he had a little over five thousand bushels. This year he is getting better than $2.00. At our State Horticultural meeting he showed thirty varieties and there was not a single apple that could be found that had either a worm hole in it or a scab. At one of our institute meetings held right near his place he went into the storage and brought a box that was taken out at random and turned out on the table and you could find neither a scab nor a worm in his apples. Now, this man cultivates thoroughly, and he cultivates until after the 10th of September and his reason for doing that is that he wants to destroy by cultivation the homes of all the larvae that have gone into winter quarters to come up and sting his apples next year, and he cannot do it unless that is done. We know that

they all burrow within an inch of the surface of the ground and that they have all gone into winter quarters before the 10th of September, but if cultivation is stopped by the first of July, they are simply all housed there in nice quarters ready to hatch out in the spring and you have got your pest to fight again. The President: Does he spray?

Mr. Rowe: He sprays thoroughly, but he says he never was successful with his spray unless he kept his cultivation up in that way.

Mr. Crawford: Has he had any winter killing?

Mr. Rowe: No, he has no winter killing at all. I might say this orchard is twenty-five years old and it was set to apples and peaches. The peaches are now gone, the last of the peaches were pulled out two years ago. Now it is an apple orchard, the trees were set sixteen feet apart and every other tree in the row was an apple tree and now the peaches are gone. He has kept up that cultivation for several years.

Mr. Henry: Do you think that method would answer here in Wisconsin just as well?

Mr. Rowe: I believe it would.

Mr. Street: How does he keep his fertility, the humus?

Mr. Rowe: The humus in the ground,-well, he puts on plenty of manure. He has quite a dairy in connection with his place and his stable manure is scattered out. About the 10th of September he sows oats, he gets quite a heavy stand of oats. Mr. Goodman: He is doing the right thing exactly.

Mr. Rowe: But the main point I am trying to make is that it seems to me in all this talk of cultivation, you stop cultivating too quickly. The last three or four weeks it seems to me is the more important time to cultivate in order to help the spraying time out the next spring.

Mr. Toole: Are you troubled with winter killing under any conditions?

Mr. Rowe: Yes, we have some winter killing, but I think a great deal of what we call winter killing has not been winter killing. We have four men that have claimed that they were able by cultivation and treating of the soil to enable their trees without any cover crop to stand from eight to ten degrees more frost than they would otherwise and that by constant cultivation and no cover crop at all by the very liberal use of wood ashes. I know of one of our best exhibitors and the best growers for years, E. J. Philips, who was right close to the city and

he never had a cover crop and he grew the tenderest varieties of peaches and cherries by the liberal use of hardwood ashes. His teams were hauling ashes from the city all the time and he claimed his trees would stand from eight to ten degrees more frost, and I know, following that hard winter weather when no one in our section had any peaches the next year to speak of, because the buds were killed, Mr. Philips' were not any better looking than Mr. Grimes' or my own, but he had peaches to sell at $3.00 a bushel and plenty of them, not as many as usual, but he had peaches. When cherries were all gone, Mr. Philips always had cherries. He contended, although it was disputed by many, but the old man always contended that he, by the liberal use of wood ashes, was able to make his trees that much hardier so that he did not need any cover crop. I don't know whether there has been any experiment carried on along that line.

Mr. Sperbeck: It seems to me that the late cultivation would stimulate a growth and be injurious in a northern latitude; that the wood would not mature in time to stand the winters.

Mr. Periam: That is a fallacy; the late cultivation does not necessarily throw the tree into late growth. Occasionally under any system the tree will stop growing and then take on a later growth, but the continuation of cultivation through the whole season does not necessarily, nor does it really, carry the tree into winter quarters with immature, unripe wood. That is the result of circumstances they get now and then.

Mr. Rowe: I have found in my own experience that when I had cultivated constantly until the 10th or 15th of September, that it did not cause trees to continue their growth longer than those that I stopped cultivating in July, but I found on the other hand that when I had a piece that was left and could not get out to plow it and did nothing with it until way along to the first of July, that there I would have a late growth. But when I began to cultivate early and kept it up late it did not continue the growth longer than if I had stopped. If I began late, that is where I had the trouble.

BORDEAUX MIXTURE AND HOW TO MAKE IT.

PROF. S. A. BEACH, Iowa State College.

I will talk to you a few moments upon the old subject of spraying with Bordeaux mixture. Bordeaux mixture has come. to be recognized as par excellence the best liquid preparation with which to hold fungous diseases under control, speaking of those diseases that attack our fruit bearing plants. It is a mixture which was accidentally discovered; the hint was obtained from the practical experience of fruit growers in France; it is not something that was first worked out by scientists and then handed over to the fruit growers, but it is something which came from the fruit growers themselves. The story is of interest, it has been told a good many times, but I want to tell it again, as to just how this Bordeaux mixture came to be known.

The French grape growers some years ago found that an American disease was devastating their vineyards; it was the grape mildew, something that had been imported from this country, and was spreading there very rapidly, and causing a great deal of damage. In one of the districts near Bordeaux where grapes were grown, some of the grape growers were bothered by the pilfering of grapes from those vines that stood next to the road; people passing by would help themselves to the fruit and they determined to do something, if possible, to scare them. They did not wish to poison the fruit, but they did wish to make the people who went by believe that they had put something on that would poison them; so they took copper sulphate and mixed it with fresh slaked lime, and with a whisk of twigs spattered it over the grape vines along the road. It so happened that these men had the mildew on their grape vines and the important discovery was made that where this mixture of copper sulphate and lime had been spattered on the vines they did not have nearly so much of the mildew. This fact was reported to Millardet, professor of the faculty of sciences in Bordeaux. From this suggestion he and others worked up the method of making the preparation which we now know as Bordeaux mixture. In 1886, I think it was,