Show I J = Fruit Trees and Mice Every winter In some parts of the country great losses are experienced in the orchards by the ravages of mice It Is not unusual to take up a report from a state of the United States or province of Canada and find numerous reports of the great havoc wrought by mice We noticed a while ago a report from the province of On tarlo I Among the reports were these which wpre characteristic From Qlengnry Thousands of fruit trees have been ruined by mice From Carleton 01 fruit trees nro in fine condition but young orchards have been almost destroyed by field mice From Parry Sound Mice were very destructive last winter and did a lot of damage to young fruit trees From Dufferln Fruit trees were badly peeled peel-ed by mice during the winter Wo might repeat numerous other reports of the same general character Reports Re-ports secured from various northern states of the Union frequently have a like tenor Losses from mice always occur on young trees generally trees that are one or two years old These little creatures can do a very great amount of damage because It requires but avery a-very small damage to any one tree to kill it The mice simply gnaw entirely entire-ly around a tree at the snow line They are after the young bark to satisfy sat-isfy their hunger The space gnawed may not be more than an inch wide but it means the doom of tho tree It Is no wonder then that a wholo orchard orch-ard is sometimes wiped out in a single sin-gle year by these young rodents They are especially dangerous where straw or corn stalks have been placed around trees as this makes a hiding place for the mice Corn stalks are frequently put around trees to protect them from sunscald In winter The trees aro saved from this Injury but Instead are destroyed by the mice Where mice are troublesome the best way Is to destroy all their hiding places In the orchards and adjoining fields In the west wo have few stonewalls stone-walls to act as protectors of the mice and it is easier to prevent their ravages rav-ages than In the eastern states where 1 every farm orchard Is protected on some side by a stone wall Where the hiding places cannot be destroyed some kind of tree protector will have to be used One of the best of these Is a shield made of laths bound together togeth-er by wire This is sunk into the ground around the tree before the soil freezes hard in the fall The wire lath shield Is inexpensive and any man can make it The wires are simply sim-ply crossed between each two laths and the spaces between any two laths must not be large enough to permit tho rodents to cut through We would like to hear from our readers as to their methods of protecting their orchards against mice Transpiration of Trees The transpiration of trees is the process of the tree taking the water up by Its roots passing It up through the trunk and branches and Into tho leaves and evaporating it into tho atmosphere at-mosphere The amount of water thus transpired by trees is very grp it Even the ordinary tree thus uses s v eral barrels of water every day There are many problems connected with this process that are only being studied and have net been solved + One of these la the ptwer of trees to resist drouth It would naturally be assumed that the tree that uses the least water can stand drouth the best The actual tests of the matter however how-ever do not carry out this theory One Russian experimenter found that while a maple tree was transpiring 289 pounds of water au ash tree from the same surface transpired 399 pounds 110 pounds more than the other This was approximately 30 percent per-cent It Is known however that ash trees stand drouth far better than maples Groves of ash trees and maple trees that came under the observation ob-servation of this Russian experimenter experiment-er were subjected to very severe drouth conditions in the fall of 1902 and the spring of 1903 Nearly nil of the maples died while the ash trees continued their existence and developed devel-oped normally during the summer and fall of 1903 This Is of great Importance Impor-tance to people living In the semiarid semi-arid districts For some reason the trees using the greater amount of water ore able to get that water from greater depths In the soil and are able to hold up the cellular structure of tho leaf with n less amount of water than others Inmes Gordon Anderson Co Kas |