Fruit Prospects In Oregon

The Williametie Farmer, of Oregon, says: "The fruit crop this season will be light, many orchards hardly bearing enough for family use. In many localities the frost has been very severe, killing large apple trees; even town raspberries and blackberries are much injured."

Fruit Stains

To remove these, hold the cloth tightly over some vessel, and poor boiling water through it, and most kinds will quickly disappear.

Berberis aquifolia, once sold at a guinea an inch, may be propagated in the open air, from cuttings of one joint of the last year's growth.

Fruit Tree Seeds

D. A. Carley, (Dundee, Ill.) Pour some milk-warm water over the apple, pear and other seeds, lately received by you in a dry state; let it stand a quarter of an hour, then pour hot water, (just so hot that you can barely keep your hand in it,) over them, and let it remain an hour. Then plant them. If you can cover the drills in which you plant, (after you have covered the seeds to the usual depth - half an inch) - with about half an inch of spent tan, or what is much better, very rotten manure, or decayed leaf mould from the woods, you will greatly promote their vegetation and after-growth. The seeds that washing, and it would have been much better done last fell than now. Afterwards, plant in the same way. The wild plum, crab and thorns which you speak of, will answer pretty well as stocks; but they do not generally do so well as seedling stocks more akin to the sorts to be worked on them.

Fruit Winter Killed

Mr. B. F. Bartolet, writing from Eastern Pennsylvania, speaks thus of the destruction of fruit in that section of country. " Fruit growing in Eastern Pennsylvania is well-nigh done for this season. We may have a few apples and pears yet, if nothing happens to destroy them. On the morning of the 3d inst. we had a killing frost, and on the 4th it snowed. If it had not melted it would have been a foot thick; as it was, it lay from three to five inches. The grapes, all my dwarf pears, Chestnut trees, and many other trees and fruits, are totally destroyed. It is yet cold, and the curculio is at work on a few plums that remain. It is too cold for corn, which is not yet all planted, as the season has been, so far, a very wet one".

We have many similar accounts from different sections. In some places not only all the buds killed, but the trees themselves. The prospect for fruit the present season is meager indeed.

Fruit-Gathering Instrument

At the same time, was exhibited a fruit-gathering instrument, thus described: "The apparatus consists of a rod, which may be of any length (say six feet or three feet), and on the end of it is placed a movable contrivance composed of two rings, which meet and part like a pair of shears, and these rings are covered with a disk of vulcanized India rubber. They are worked by means of a sort of trigger, which is at the hand end of the rod, and when they clasp the fruit, the two disks of India rubber yield to the pressure, and the fruit is gathered uninjured. In place of these disks, Mr. Jones can also fix a netted bag and a cutting and holding apparatus for gathering grapes. This is a very desirable invention, and cannot fail to come into general use among amateurs and ladies who do not care to mount a ladder, or risk the safety of their necks by practising gymnastics up a pear-tree." [Is not this very much the same as one patented in America? - Ed].