of effectiveness. Away back in the early days of horticulture in this
country, when the curculio became very abundant rewards were offered for
an effective method of combating it. Several were proposed, but only a
few were at all effective. The best of these methods is what is called
"jarring."
The curculio has the habit of falling to the ground and "playing
'possum" when disturbed. This led to the practice of holding or
spreading sheets beneath the tree and then striking the tree a sudden,
forcible blow with a padded pole or mallet in order to dislodge the
beetles. The trees were jarred daily from the time the calyx or "shuck"
began to slip from the newly set fruit until the beetles had
disappeared, or for at least four or five weeks. This was practiced to
quite an extent, but it takes too much time and is too expensive.
A still better remedy is clean cultivation. Experiments have shown that
as high as 76.75 per cent. of the pupae may be destroyed by means of
thorough cultivation. The mere breaking of the pupal cell, leaving the
earth in contact with the body of the pupa, is fatal to many. Others are
killed by the crushing action of the earth as it is stirred. Others are
exposed to the elements and subject to the attacks of their enemies,
such as ants and birds. Sunlight is quickly fatal to them, and exposure
to the air on a warm day in the shade is also fatal to them.
Observations show that the insect is in the pupal condition in the
ground in from fifty to sixty-five days after the falling of the
blossoms of such fruit as apples and plums. Data have been presented to
show that the minimum time spent in the ground is about twenty days.
Shallow cultivation should begin, therefore, in about eight or nine
weeks after blossoming. It is best to cultivate every week or oftener
for six or seven weeks. It is very necessary that this cultivation
should reach immediately beneath the spread of the limbs, as most of the
curculios are found here, having dropped from the fruit above and
burrowed into the soil where they fell.
The third method of combating the curculio, the method most commonly
used and most generally recommended, is spraying with arsenical poisons.
The spray most generally used is arsenate of lead. The most economical
and effective way is to add arsenate of lead to Bordeaux mixture. The
Bordeaux is mixed in the following proportions: three pounds of copper
sulphate (blue vitriol), four pounds of lime, and fifty gallons of
water. To this amount of Bordeaux mixture three pounds of arsenate of
lead are added. In place of Bordeaux mixture lime-sulphur may be used.
If the insecticide is used alone, three pounds of arsenate of lead in
fifty gallons of water make an effective spray. It is best to spray
three times, the first spraying coming just before the blossoms open,
the second coming ten days later, and the third another ten days later.
The cost is from ten to fifteen cents per tree for the three sprayings.
This cost is lessened when combined with other sprays.
While spraying greatly reduces the injuries inflicted, yet it is
apparent that account must be taken of other factors, such as the
relative abundance of insects as compared with the amount of fruit
present on the trees. With a small fruit crop and an abundance of
curculios, the most thorough spraying in the world will not serve to
bring through a satisfactory amount of sound fruit.
While spraying is undoubtedly the most important aid and, if persisted
in from year to year, may answer for its control, as its effects are
cumulative, yet it is clear that other control measures should also be
employed. In all cases which have come under observation the insects
have always been found most abundant in orchards which are in sod or are
poorly cared for and allowed to grow up more or less in weeds and trash.
Also, orchards near woods always suffer severely, especially along the
border. As opposed to this condition is the notably less injury in
orchards kept free from weeds and trash. In such cases spraying usually
given for other insects, as the codling moth, serves to keep the
curculio well under control. In fact, it may be said as a general
statement that the curculio will never become seriously troublesome in
orchards given the usual routine attention in cultivation, spraying and
pruning now considered essential in successful fruit growing. Serious
losses from the curculio are almost conclusive evidence of neglect,
which is best and most quickly corrected by the adoption of proper
orchard practice.
* * * * *
AN ANTIDOTE FOR WASP STINGS.--It not infrequently happens that
persons biting unguardedly into fruit in which a wasp is concealed
receive stings in the mouth or throat. Such stings may be exceedingly
dangerous and even fatal since the affected tissues swell rapidly and
this is liable to cause difficulty in swallowing and breathing. An
effective antidote is employed in Switzerland. The sting is rubbed
vigorously with garlic, or, if it is too deep in the throat for this
treatment, a few drops of the juice from bruised garlic are swallowed.
If garlic is not to be obtained onion may take its place, but is a less
active agent. The efficacy of this simple remedy was verified by a Swiss
specialist, who found it important enough to be presented at a session
of the Vaudois Society of Medicine.
Increasing the Fertility of the Land.
PROF. F. J. ALWAY, DIVISION OF SOILS, UNIVERSITY FARM, ST. PAUL.
I have been asked to speak on "Increasing the Fertility of the Land." To
speak on such a subject is sometimes a rather delicate matter because
some people consider they have a soil so good that you can't increase
its fertility. With some of the prairie soils, when they were first
plowed up that wouldn't have been so very far amiss. Take those black
prairie soils with the grayish yellow clay subsoil, with an abundance of
lime in it, which you find in a large part of the state, including a
large part of Hennepin County, and you have as good a soil as you may
expect to find anywhere on the earth's surface. But you can't keep a
soil up to its full limit of fertility, no matter how good it is, unless
you frequently treat it with something.
[Illustration: Prof. F. J. Alway.]
When a soil is well supplied with lime there are three things that are
liable to be deficient. If it is not well supplied with lime there may
be four, but the bulk of your soils are good enough so far as lime is
concerned. Those three are potash, which is abundant and will be
abundant 100 years from now, phosphoric acid, or phosphorus, with which
our soils are fairly well supplied, and nitrogen, which comes from the
vegetable matter. In nitrogen our prairie soils are remarkably rich when
first plowed up. The phosphoric acid and the potash you can not lose
unless they are taken away in the form of crops, but the nitrogen may be
lost without even taking off crops. All you have to do is to cultivate
your soil, when part of the nitrogen becomes soluble in water and is
carried down by the rain into the water-table unless you have plants
growing with roots to take it up; a large part escapes into the air. So
when your black prairie soil has been under cultivation for twenty
years, as an orchard, usually from one-half to one-third of the
original nitrogen has escaped, most of it into the air, only the smaller
part being carried off in the crops. That is the one thing that
orchardists and horticulturists have to concern themselves about first
of all, so far as soil fertility is concerned.
I see that the first of the questions for me to answer deals with that.
"What crop do you consider the best green manure?" There are two kinds
of green manures. One is represented by rye. Rye takes up the nitrogen
that is in the soil, and when it dies leaves behind what it took out of
the soil; the next crop can get this. By plowing under the rye crop you
do not increase the amount of nitrogen, the most important element of
fertility in the soil.
We have a better green manure than that, better than rye or oats or
barley or any of those plants that properly belong to the grass family;
namely, the members of the clover, bean or pea family--all of these
plants which are called legumes, which have pods and which have flowers
shaped like butterflies.
As these grow they take up nitrogen from the air; the bacteria which
make their home on the roots of those plants take the nitrogen from the
air and give it to their host plants. The plants receive this nitrogen,
store it in themselves, and when the crop is plowed under you have a
great amount of nitrogen added to the soil. Now, a clover crop of an
acre growing from spring until the freeze-up in the fall may take out of
the air as much as 120 pounds of nitrogen. One hundred and twenty pounds
of nitrogen, bought in the form of commercial fertilizer from Swift &
Company, or Northrup, King & Company, would cost you $24.00. The clover
has taken that much out of the air. If the crop were pastured off, the
greater part of this nitrogen would be returned to the soil; when you
plow the clover under still more nitrogen is taken from the air by
bacteria that live upon the decaying plant material, and you may have
$48.00 worth of nitrogen per acre added to the soil by simply growing
clover for one year.
Any kind of green manure crop that bears pods is good. Vetches are good,
and soy beans are among the best for orchards. Clover, if you give it
time to make a good growth, is as good as anything.
The next question is--"Should apple raisers use commercial fertilizers?"
Now, the apple tree, when it is growing on good soil, makes such a
vigorous root development that it is hard to get any commercial
fertilizer to help it. On poor soils it, like any other kind of plant,
will respond to fertilizers. Some of the eastern experimental stations
have been carrying on investigations with commercial fertilizers for a
great many years to see whether in apple orchards these will cause an
increase in the yield or an improvement in the quality of the fruit. On
good soils, even after ten or twelve years' fertilization they have been
found to have no effect except in the case of nitrogen, and this can be
better supplied in the form of a green manure plowed under than in any
other way. That is to say, keep your orchard clean until the last of
July or first of August, sow your green manure crop, let it grow until
freeze-up and stay there during the winter time. It holds the snow and
so affords some winter protection. In the spring plow it under, and you
plow under all the nitrogen that the plants had collected the previous
year. Then keep your orchard clean during the summer time, until in July
or August you again sow the green manure crop.
[Illustration: Applying ground limestone to an acid soil to determine
whether liming will be profitable. Half of the field is left unlimed.]
The fertilizers that I get more inquiries about than any others are the
phosphates--bone meal, acid phosphate and rock phosphate.
Horticulturists have read that striking results are being obtained with
these on certain crops in the eastern and central states, and they want
to know whether the same fertilizers will pay here. Some inquire about
potash fertilizers. With the latter there is no doubt but that the
results we would obtain would, even under ordinary circumstances, not
pay. At the present time potash costs about ten times what it does in
times of peace. Sulphate of potash, which ordinarily brings $45.00 per
ton, is now quoted at $450. This puts its use out of the question.
The phosphoric acid fertilizers are no higher now than usual. They cost,
according to the kind, from $9.50 to $25.00 per ton. Some of them are
produced near here--in South St. Paul. With tree crops, apple, plum and
pear, we need expect no increased yield from the use of phosphates,
unless it be on our very poorest soils. On certain crops, like the bush
fruits--the currants and the raspberries, we might get a distinct
benefit. I cannot give a definite answer to that. I can tell you what
results they have obtained in New York state, what they have obtained in
Pennsylvania or Illinois or Maine, but what results we would get in
Minnesota we do not know. We can't apply their results to our
conditions. The only thing we can do is to carry on such experiments
here, and they have not yet been started. That brings me to a third
question I have here.
"What experiments are being conducted by the University of Minnesota
with orchard and other horticultural crops?" We realized the importance
of this matter and plans were prepared. Then, as you know the last
legislature was economical. It decided that one of the best places to
make a cut would be in the funds for experimental work; when these funds
were reduced we not only could start no new experiments but even had to
cut off some of the old ones. For that reason these fertilizer
experiments have to wait until the next legislature or the one after. I
hope the next legislature will make such an appropriation that they may
be begun.
Now, for the next question. A man states that he can secure at a very
low rate limestone from one of the Minneapolis companies producing
crushed limestone for road-making purposes and wants to know whether it
will pay him to haul it to his farm. Well, if you do not have any other
work for your teams it may pay you. However, if your time is valuable,
you had better take some samples of the soil and send them in to the
experiment station. Just address them to the Soils Department or Soils
Division. Then we can decide whether it is worth while trying some of
the limestone. We cannot tell you whether it will pay; we can tell you
whether it is likely to pay, or whether it is likely to be a waste of
energy, or whether it is so doubtful that you ought to give it a fair
trial. On perhaps two-thirds of the fields in Hennepin County it would
be a waste of money and energy; on about half of the others, we may say,
it is almost certain to be a good investment at a dollar a ton. On the
remaining portion we simply can't say. On these, chances are even
whether it would pay. No crops are injured by limestone, so you are safe
in putting it on. Practically all crops are benefited by it on sour
soils and especially the vegetable crops.
The next question is--"Are the black peat or muck soils first class? Do
they need anything besides drainage?" Some of them, a very few, produce
really good crops when they are drained, plowed and brought under
ordinary cultivation without fertilization, but only a few. Nearly all
of them need commercial fertilizer, and until a bog covered with peat
soil has been carefully examined to ascertain the depth of the peat, the
difficulty of drainage, and the character of the peat (because peats
differ greatly within a few miles of each other) it is unwise to attempt
to reclaim it. Within three miles of the experiment station we have
three bogs very different in character. One, about half a mile from the
buildings, is heavily charged with lime. Another has an exceedingly
small quantity of lime so that profitable crop production of any kind
would be out of the question without a heavy application of ground
limestone or quicklime. Still another one stands between these two. One
of them can be reclaimed without any great expense, but with the one it
would be a very expensive matter to fertilize and treat with lime after
it had been drained.
Those are the questions that have been given me. Are there any other
questions?
Mr. McCall: What is peat lacking in?
Mr. Alway: Practically all peats are lacking in potash. If the peat
layer be very shallow, six inches, twelve inches, sometimes even
twenty-four inches, the plants are able to get their roots down through
the peat and get their potash from the underlying clay or loam. In that
case no fertilizer is needed. Some of the peats lack lime, some of them
lack lime, potash and phosphoric acid, and some these three and nitrogen
also, so that you either have to apply some commercial form of nitrogen
or grow legumes as green manures.
Mr. Kellogg: What was the trouble where I couldn't raise strawberries on
new wood soil?
Mr. Alway: I couldn't answer that.
Mr. Kellogg: The leaf mold was six or eight inches deep.
Mr. Alway: Was it any deeper than that?
Mr. Kellogg: I don't know, it may have been down a foot, and the leaf
mold had been accumulating there for ages.
Mr. Alway: In some cases the peat is so thoroughly decayed that it looks
like leaf mold and it may be a foot or two feet deep.
Mr. Kellogg: This was no peat, it was just wood soil. I could not raise
anything--
Mr. Alway: Did the plants grow?
Mr. Kellogg: Yes, the plants grew and wintered well but didn't bear
worth a cent.
Mr. Alway: Did they make lots of runners?
Mr. Kellogg: Oh, fairly good, but right over the fence in the next field
that had been worked for twenty-five years I got 260 bushels of
strawberries to the acre; never had any manure on it.
Mr. Alway: The more leaf mold the more nitrogen; if you have too much
nitrogen it may develop the vine and fail to form fruit or seed.
Mr. Ludlow: On heavy black prairie soil, three feet deep, where I am
growing eighty bushels of corn to the acre, I want to put in
strawberries, and I have a lot of wood ashes, dry wood ashes, not
leached ashes, but dry wood ashes. Would it be worth while to put that
on or would that overdo the thing? Would it be policy to put that on?
Mr. Alway: It is not likely to do any harm, and it is likely to do some
good. Wood ashes contain chiefly lime and potash. The potash will be a
distinct benefit. The lime isn't of any particular benefit to this crop
on most soils. For strawberries it is slightly harmful on our ordinary
soils that are originally well supplied with lime.
Mr. Ludlow: On another piece a ways from that I put out a young orchard,
and in order to start the trees well I had covered the ground half an
inch deep with wood ashes around those trees. I noticed that the weeds
grew there twice as quick as they did when I got away from the wood
ashes.
Mr. Alway: There you have the benefit of the potash and the lime. If you
put lime in the orchards it will make the clover and most of the other
green manure crops grow better, and thus you gain in nitrogen from the
lime; you gain in potash as it comes from the wood ashes.
Mr. Brackett: Have you ever found any ground with too much leaf mold on
it to grow good strawberries?
Mr. Alway: I have not.
Mr. Brackett: I remember when I broke out my place where I am living now
I had a place where the leaves had collected and rotted until I would
say there was eight or ten inches of leaf mold. When you went across it
you would sink in almost to your shoe tops. On that piece of ground I
grew 11,000 quarts of strawberries to the acre in a year, the largest
yield I had ever grown on that leaf mold. You can never get too much
leaf mold. There must have been something else besides the leaf mold.
Mr. Alway: In case a crop does not give a satisfactory yield it may be
due to other things than the soil, and until we eliminate the other
possible causes we can't safely blame it to the soil.
Mr. Moyer: What do those black soils in the western part of the state
need? They have a whitish deposit on top.
Mr. Alway: Drainage. That is alkali.
Mr. Kochendorfer: I have a ten-year apple orchard that I disked last
year and kept it tolerably clean this spring. There were a lot of
dandelions sprung up that I mowed down the middle of July, and since
then they have grown up again. Will they take nitrogen the same as
clover?
Mr. Alway: They won't take any from the air. They will act like so much
rye, but when they die and decay nitrogen will be gathered from the air
and added to the soil by bacteria that live upon the decaying vegetable
matter.
Mr. Kellogg: Did you ever hear of them dying?
Mr. Alway: Dandelions? If they are plowed under.
A Member: Is it practicable to grow soy beans in this soil? Can they be
gotten at a reasonable price, and can we mature them here?
Mr. Alway: They mature here without any serious difficulty. There are a
great many different varieties. If you order them from a distant seed
house you may get a variety that will mature in Louisiana but not in
Minnesota.
A Member: How about cowpeas?
Mr. Alway: Cowpeas are disappointing thus far north. In Minnesota they
are not nearly as satisfactory as the soy bean. In an unusually warm
summer they are satisfactory.
A Member: With the soy bean do you have to plow in the whole of it?
Mr. Alway: Yes. The whole plant ought to be plowed under.
A Member: Would it be practicable to feed soy beans in an orchard?
Mr. Alway: Yes. You don't get quite the same benefit from the green
manure when you pasture as when you plow under.
A Member: How about the hairy vetch? Does it grow here?
Mr. Alway: Yes. It grows here. It is not a bad crop at all.
* * * * *
POISONING TREE SCALE.--We take the following from _Scientific
American_ as worth consideration by the owners of orchards and lawns:
A correspondent in _Science_ relates the following rather startling
experiment in killing tree scale by poisoning the sap of the tree. He
says:
"I have in my ground a plant of Spanish broom about a dozen years old
and with a trunk about four inches in diameter which has for several
years been seriously infested by cottony cushion scale (_Icerya
purchasi_). I have tried various sprays, have put scale-eating beetles
on the tree, and at one time cut all the branches off and sprayed the
trunk several times in the attempt to get permanently rid of this scale,
but up to last winter it seemed that all attempts were in vain. In
February of this year, when the broom was very thickly covered with the
scale, I bored a three-eighths inch hole in the trunk to a depth of
about three inches, filled the hole nearly full of crystals of potassic
cyanide, and plugged it up. In two days the scale began to fall from the
tree and in a few days all appeared dead. Others hatched and attacked
the tree, but lasted only a short time, and the tree has since been free
from scale and very vigorous."
NOTICE OF SUMMER MEETING, 1916
A JOINT SESSION OF THE MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY AND ITS
AUXILIARIES, THE MINNESOTA STATE GARDEN FLOWER SOCIETY, THE MINNESOTA
STATE BEE KEEPERS SOCIETY AND THE MINNESOTA STATE FLORISTS SOCIETY.
Will be held FRIDAY, JUNE 23rd, 1916, in the Gymnasium, at University
Farm, St. Paul.
THE GYMNASIUM BUILDING in which this meeting is to be held has
recently been constructed and only finished suitable for the uses of
this gathering within the past year. The grounds about it are still in
part in an unfinished condition. Directly south of this building are the
football grounds, originally a marshy tract, now filled in and leveled
off, with hillsides sloping upwards some thirty to forty feet on either
side, well shaded. These slopes would be excellent places for the picnic
dinner and the afternoon session except for the fact that they have
recently been seeded and are not yet in condition for use. The main room
in the gymnasium building, which is a very large room--at least three
times as large as the one occupied by our exhibit last year--will be
used for the fruit and flower display, and exhibitors can have access to
this hall early in the forenoon, though visitors will be barred from the
exhibition hall until 12:00 m. to give ample opportunity for placing and
judging the display.
The exhibition will remain in place undisturbed until 9:00 o'clock p.m.
The flowers will be distributed to the various hospitals in the Twin
Cities.
THE PREMIUM LIST accompanying this notice is practically the
same as last year, there being only a few minor changes, to which it
will not be necessary to refer here. The season, up to the time of
writing this notice at least, having been a favorable one we are
anticipating a large display of flowers, probably the finest ever shown
at any of our summer gatherings, and as the weather is always pleasant
on the occasion of our summer meeting a large gathering of members and
visitors is also assured.