you put a mulch
under the tree? Won't that prevent thawing and hold the tree for a week
or two?

DR. MORRIS: Yes, sir.

THE PRESIDENT: Have you used this particular almond?

DR. MORRIS: One very much like it, and it was a mighty good almond--hard
to get at but good.

THE PRESIDENT: I would like to ask Mr. Reed as to the blooming time of
this particular tree in comparison with some standard peach like the
Elberta.

MR. M. P. REED: It bloomed about a week earlier than the Elberta, and
the peach crop is light.

MR. HENRY STABLER: I have been associated for the past three or four
years occasionally with Mr. M. B. Waite, of the Department of
Agriculture, and I have had a good chance to study the effect of
spraying on peaches in preventing brown rot and curculio. At Mr.
Littlepage's I observed an almond tree that started, I should think,
with twenty-five or thirty almonds on it this spring. Those almonds
gradually succumbed to the curculio and brown rot until, at last, only
one was left, and it seems to me that, if this almond is to be grown
commercially in this climate, we will have to use the same methods of
growing as with peaches, and we will have to spray them.

THE PRESIDENT: I think the chief benefit of the discussion of the almond
would be to get more of us to try it, and the fact that we have one
which is only one week earlier than the Elberta peach in blooming shows
that we have a good chance, possibly, of even exceeding the
possibilities of the peaches.

MR. MCCOY: Mr. President, I notice a good many almonds bloom about the
same time as Elberta peaches. I have probably twenty-five trees of this
almond that Mr. Reed spoke of, and I think they were in bloom at the
time the peaches were. It is very productive, just as he says. I have
noticed some of the old trees around in our neighborhood have borne good
crops for several years, and I don't notice much disease on them either.

DR. STABLER: I asked the question whether anybody knows whether the
almond is affected by peach yellows, and nobody seems to know, but peach
yellows is something connected with climate. There is a yellows line
that has remained definite and distinct for the last twenty-five years,
and you can describe that line on the map, and it stays right where you
put it. All north of that line the peach trees are affected by yellows,
and south they are not. That line runs through Mount Vernon and
Annapolis, and across Chesapeake Bay to Chester