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Show OUR SPRAYING AND PRUNING PROBLEM By JOHN E. BLAZZARD District Agricultural Inspector. Washington county fruit growers and people in general are in need of awakening to the problems of spraying spray-ing and pruning that confront them in this county. No other county in the state is in such need of training and aid of a scientific , nature along the lines of horticulture. We are in the gruit growing business, be it but a starter, and we are going to stay, but we are not going to develop any commercial quantity of fruit as long as the present negligent practices of orchard management are practiced. We hope to build up a business of fruits and truck garden crops in Dixie. This has been the cry for the past 15 or 20 years. Except for the efforts and example of a small per cent of our farmers and fruit men, Washington Washing-ton county is no nearer being a fruit country that it was twenty years ago. We can never hope to be recognized on the market as long as we produce crops in the truck load quantity. We need carload lots and we are capable of producing many of them. In looking over the county as the time for the care of the orchard and vineyard approaches it is readily seen why we are not growing fruit in com- j mercial quantities. It is a safe esti-I esti-I mate to say that half of the fruit trees in the county will go unpruned and two-thirds of them unsprayed. Can we ever hope to develop a market with wormy and infested fruit? It has long been known that we cannot, yet we go on sleeping and continue to boast of j the fine fruit produced in Dixie. Granted that we can raise the best fruit in the world. Do we do it? With a market open such as we had last year we could market ten times j the amount of peaches that were ; shipped, yet when the packing houses were visited one was staggered by the amount of fruit that was turned back not fit to be packed. Most of this w-as fruit that could not meet the re-i re-i quirements of the state law aS to ; w'ornis and disease. j A good many of the farmers realize real-ize that they must produce clean fruit ! if they are to be able to place it on j the market, and to do so they kno .v ! they must spray and care for their I trees. Other growers know that they i should spray and prune but they build ! their hopes on having a year when insects in-sects fail to be plentiful. Such a year never arrives. These orchards that are i never sprayed not only produce infest-I infest-I ed fruit but worse than this they furnish fur-nish an excellent breeding place for I insects to grow and infest the orchard ! of their nearest neighbor who has ! sprayed and is in hopes of producing i clean fruit. i Let us, as fruit growers, decide to produce marketable fruit that can pass ; the inspection and' scrutiny of the 1 keenest discriminating individual. To : do this we must spray and prune, fer-: fer-: ti!:e and cultivate. Let's wake up and put Dixie on the map in any early fruit growing way. Such a dream as we have been having for the last 20 years can be realized but it means car.eful and well planned orchard practice. prac-tice. We cannot hope to use cows and horses for pruning shears . and muddy : water for fertilizer and ever hope to produce fruit. |