any one has the bitter rot they are scared to
death, they think they are suffering untold misfortune. The bitter rot
attacks the apples when nearly grown. The ground is covered with the
rotted apples, and you can see them in the trees, but this little bit of
scab fungus, they do not seem to notice that.

The reason is this, that scab comes from very minute spores that appear
upon the apples in May or June, and as the summer advances they spread
more and more. It depends, of course, upon the amount of moisture there
is present, but it begins its work when the apples are very small. If it
gets upon the stem of the apple it works around the stem and the apple
drops off, and you have apples dropping from the time they are the size
of peas until the very last of the fall, and while it looks in the month
of June as if you are going to have a good crop of apples when it comes
harvest time your crop has diminished greatly or to nothing, and you
wonder where it has gone. With this scab fungus they just keep dropping,
dropping, all through the season; whenever you have a little rain or
wind these apples that are affected will drop off. You don't notice them
very much because they go so gradually, one at a time or so, and you
don't notice you are having any particular loss until it comes fall, and
you find that your crop is very small.

That is why I say, you should wake up to the fact that it is necessary
for you to spray if you are going to have perfect fruit and plenty of
it--and I doubt not you could increase the amount of fruit you have in
the State of Minnesota by ten times in one year by simply spraying your
orchards thoroughly at the proper time with fungicide.

To do this, as I said, you must have a spraying outfit, individually or
collectively, in your neighborhood, and if you get one individually you
can take the contract to spray your neighbor's trees, if you wish, and
get back enough to pay you for the outlay. If you have only a few trees
and you have some one who understands it, you could just as well spray a
few other orchards in the neighborhood and get your spraying done for
nothing in that way, charging them enough to cover the cost and enough
for some profit. That is done in some sections and is a very
satisfactory way.

The only way, however, that I would do this, if I were you, would be to
enter into a joint arrangement of not less than five years, because if
you do it from year to year, if a man has good