LEAFLET LIII.
AN APPLE TWIG AND AN APPLE.[71]
By L. H. BAILEY.
Yesterday I went over into the old apple orchard. It was a clear November day. The trees were bare. The wind had carried the leaves into heaps in the hollows and along the fences. Here and there a cold-blue wild aster still bloomed. A chipmunk chittered into a stone pile.
I noticed many frost-bitten apples still clinging to the limbs. There were decayed ones on the ground. There were several small piles of fruit that the owner had neglected, lying under the trees, and they were now worthless. I thought that there had been much loss of fruit, and I wondered why. If the fruit-grower had not made a profit from the trees, perhaps the reason was partly his own fault. Not all the apples still clinging to the tree were frost-bitten and decayed. I saw many very small apples, no larger than the end of my finger, standing stiff on their stems. Plainly these were apples that had died when they were young. I wondered why.
Fig 301. This is the branch that tried and failed.
I took a branch home and photographed it. You have the engraving in [Fig. 301]. Note that there are three dead young apples at the tip of one branch. Each apple came from a single flower. These flowers grew in a cluster. There were three other flowers in this cluster, for I could see the scars where they fell off.
But why did these three fruits die? The whole branch on which they grew looked to be only half alive. I believe that it did not have vigor enough to cause the fruit to grow and ripen. If this were not the cause, then some insect or disease killed the young apples, for apples, as well as people, may have disease.
