"From what I have been reading in your bulletins and reports I see no excuse for the man who has a good farm and some capital if he keeps on working in an unprofitable way. That is all very well as far as it goes, but there are thousands of people like myself whom it does not touch. Now, I want to know just what you can do for a man who is trying to farm without capital and with a lame horse that is blind in one eye."
This led to some correspondence, and I told him about the orchard on the place. There are over fifty mature trees of standard varieties that have been yielding occasional crops of fairly good but very wormy apples. Mr. James promptly rose to the occasion and agreed to send an expert to show me how to handle that orchard. This morning Mr. F. M. Clement, B.S.A., representative of the Ontario Department of Agriculture in Elgin county, came and pruned a tree for me and told just what he will do to get results from that orchard. He outlined his part of the work and my part, and we are going ahead. Just watch us.
Before telling of the interesting day I had with Mr. Clement I want to give some idea of the trouble many good people thought I was making for myself.
"You'll just find that you will have to work in that orchard all summer if you try to handle it according to the instructions of the Department of Agriculture. They'll make you scrape the trees and whitewash them and prune them and spray them three or four times and fertilise the land and work it every day. There will be no end to the fussing you will have to do."
That was the way they talked, but I just laid back my ears and looked stubborn. I made up my mind I would carry out all instructions, even if I had to work every day and then sit up every night with those trees. They told me that the scraping alone would take me at least three weeks of steady work on trees like those. I would find that those Spies and Baldwins were
"Wild and woolly and full of fleas;
And had never been curried below the knees."
Nevertheless I was willing to curry them carefully, and even to go over them with a manicure set if that were necessary. And now my courage has been rewarded. Mr. Clement showed me how to curry an untamed tree, and estimated that I should be able to go over the whole orchard in two days at the outside. The pruning will take about a week. Then I shall have to devote about a day a week to the orchard for a couple of months. Mr. Clement and his assistant will do the spraying themselves to make sure that it is done right. That doesn't look as if I would not have any time left for anything else. Of course there is no knowing whether the work will pay or not. Unless there are plenty of fruit buds that have not been killed by the severe frosts there will be no crop. We shall have to wait until blossoming time to see what the prospects really are. In the meantime we shall do the necessary work of pruning, scraping, and the first spraying.
During the day Mr. Clement rid me of a few popular delusions. Ever since I can remember I have heard that an orchard will bear only every other year. It seems that this is true only of neglected orchards. Apple trees can be made by proper treatment to yield a decent crop every year. And yet I am not sure that I am rid of this bugbear of orcharding. This orchard has been neglected and it is just possible that this will be the off year. If the fruit buds are not on the trees all the expert work in the world will not make them bear apples. We made a hasty examination of a couple of trees and found some fruit buds, but not enough to make me see rosy visions of big profits. When I go at the pruning I shall examine more carefully, but in any case the treatment that will be given to the trees should insure a good crop next year. That seems to be the way with a whole lot of things on a farm. In order to get results you should have started working last year. I always seem to get started a year too late, but now that I have the Ontario Government shedding wisdom upon me I hope to do better. By the way, there was one thing that I forgot to ask Mr. Clement. I had been warned not to prune the trees during the full of the moon because at that time the bark is loose and the trees would be injured. But as Mr. Clement came on the second day of the new moon I presume he had this in mind. A man who has studied the question of orcharding as thoroughly as he has and has won so high a reputation for good work would never overlook so important a point.
From the above paragraphs you may get an impression that we are having spring weather out in the country. Well, it has been pretty decent for a few days, but at the time of writing the blizzard of the season is raging. Although it was quite mild on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, and this morning was still temperate enough for us to prune trees, we are having a snowstorm-driven gale from the north-east that is piling such drifts as we have not seen for many a day.
Feb. 19.—I have to thank F. M. Clement, B.S.A., for a kindness he had no thought of doing me. By a chance question he recast all my ideas of farm work. He flung two words at me over his shoulder, and instantly my ideas shifted, like the bits of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope when you shake the tube. He came over from Dutton yesterday to show me how to handle that orchard I have been talking about, and, to begin with, he pruned a tree. While at work, he explained just why he removed one branch and spared another, and told me just what I should have in mind when pruning a tree. Of this part of my experience I shall have nothing to say, for you can get such instructions as he gave in the bulletins or in The Farmer's Advocate. From time to time I asked questions, and tried to figure out just how much hard work I would have to do to get results. I was also figuring how much of the work I could get out of doing without being caught. But he finally completed his task, so that every branch was swinging free and open to the sunlight. Then he climbed down and looked at his work. I was standing behind him. Suddenly he asked, with a backward turn of his head: