The Surprise plum belongs to this type, as also does the Terry plum.  The Terry plum we want to keep a while longer, not because it is a mortgage lifter for the growers but because of the extraordinarily large size of its fruit, as well as for its fine quality.

There are many injurious insects and fungous diseases that tend to make life a burden to the man who tries to grow plums in a commercial way.  Among the insects are the plum curculio and the plum tree borer, better known as the peach tree borer.  The curculio sometimes destroys all of the fruit on the tree, and the borer very often will destroy the whole tree of any variety.

Among the fungous diseases are the shot hole fungus and the plum pocket fungus, but the worst of all is that terribly destructive disease of the plum known as the brown rot.  This brown rot fungus sometimes destroys the whole crop of certain varieties, besides injuring the trees sometimes as well.  This one disease has done more to make plum growing unpopular than all other causes combined.  Give us a cheap and efficient remedy, one that will destroy the rot fungus and not do injury to the foliage, buds or tree, and a long stride will have been made towards making plum growing popular as well as profitable.

Japanese hybrid plums.—­Just now the Japanese hybrid varieties are attracting considerable attention.  One prominent Minnetonka fruit grower said this to me about them: 

“Mr. Cook, what is the use of making all of this fuss about these new plums?  Plums are only used for the purposes of making jelly anyway, and we can usually get a dollar a bushel for our plums, and they would not pay any more than that, no matter how large and fine they are.”

This brought me up with a jerk, and I have concluded that no matter how advanced a place in horticulture these new hybrid plums may eventually take, that there will always be a place for our native varieties, even if only for the purpose of making jelly.

It seems to the writer that in view of the fact that after many years’ attempt to improve our native plum through the process of seed selection—­and we have made no material advancement in that line—­that the varieties of plums that are on the way must almost of necessity be the product of the Americana and some of the foreign varieties of plums.

Mr. Theo.  Williams, of Nebraska, a few years ago originated a great many varieties of these hybrid plums.  He claimed to have upward of 5,000 of them growing at one time.  Only a few of them, however, were ever sent out.  Of these the writer has been growing for quite a number of years the Eureka, Emerald, Stella, Omaha, B.A.Q. and some others.  As a class they are all reasonably hardy for my section.  They grow rapidly, bear early, usually the season after they are planted or the top grafts set.  They set fruit more freely and with greater regularity, as the seasons come, than do the best of our native varieties.  The fruit is of larger size and of firmer flesh, while the quality of some of them, like the B.A.Q., ranks rather low.  The quality of others of them, like the Emerald, is almost beyond comparison.