OCR Text |
Show Apples Need Cross Pollination. It has been thought, and It seems to me, not without some foundation, that season and the individual tres haa most to do with potency and the self-sterility or self-fertility of varieties. varie-ties. Prof. F. A. Waugh in an article, arti-cle, "Pollination of Apples," tells of covering nineteen blossoms of Ben Davis to test the effect of that variety's varie-ty's pollen on itself. He says that not a single fruit set and came to the conclusion that Ben Davis is self-sterile. self-sterile. These flowers were, probably, proba-bly, on the same tree, and if this be the case, it may have been only an individual in-dividual character and not one true of all the trees of that variety. Care in the present experiment was taken that the individual characters should not spoil the experiment and blossoms blos-soms were covered on two or more trees. In the case' of the Ben Davis, twenty-six of the one hundred blossoms blos-soms pollinated set fruit, though the fruits were not so large nor so vigorous vigor-ous as those from cross-fertiiization. This statement is generally true of the cross and self-pollinated fruits. It was shown that the self-fertilized fruits showed a greater tendency to fall from the tree before they had obtained ob-tained a size as large as a hazel-nut The experiments go to show that some varieties possess more potency in their pollen than do others, both on their own pistils and on the pistils of other varieties. In the following it is shown that a few varieties stand in the lead as pollinizers of the orchard. Proportion of fruits setting to number of flowers pollinated with pollen from the variety named: Ben Davis, 25 per' cent; - Huntsman, 37 per cent Cooper Early, 37 per cent; Grimes Golden, 29 per cent; Jonathan 52 per cent; , Smokehouse, per cent; . Missouri Mis-souri Pippin,. 33 per cent; Winesap, 30 per cent; Wine, 29 per cent. Of all those tested in this experiment Jonathan is . the best, Cooper Early the second and Huntsman the third. G. O. Greene. Present Outbreak of Foot-and-Mouth i- .' Disease. The present? epidemic of contagious foot-and-mouth disease in New England Eng-land was first discovered near Boston, where it rapidly spread into many towns in eastern Massachusetts and into Rhode Island and Vermont. The history of its outbreak In Vermont is as follows: Sixteen cows bought at a sale at Acton, Mass., were shipped to Gas6ett's station in the town of Chester, and received on November 21st', whence they were driven to a nearby farm. Thirteen of these cows were sold and driven to Chester station, sta-tion, four miles distant, on November 24th, where they were distributed among the farmers who purchased them. These infected cows caused a new outbreak of the disease at each place where they went, and also infected in-fected the highway' over which they traveled. Four of them were driven fifteen miles further to a farm in the town of Windham, from which In turn other farms have become infected. November No-vember 26, two days later, the original Vermont buyer, becoming alarmed, drove the diseased Massachusetts cows back to his own farm. Before becoming becom-ing aware of the' presence of the disease dis-ease in his herd, however, he sold two calves to two parties living near Perkinsville in the town of Weathers-field, Weathers-field, in whose herds foot-and-mouth disease now prevails. Two herds in the town of Springfield are quaran tined on suspicion because of exposure through these Perkinsville cases. No cases are now known to exist outside of this area. Inasmuch, however, as highways, the feet of animals passing thereon, the shoes of pedestrians, of visitors to infected farms, etc., may bear the infection, particular watchfulness watch-fulness and care are called for on the part of all stock owners. |