Mr. Philips:  I have heard George Kellogg say you could prove anything in the world in a horticultural meeting.  I was glad to have Mr. Cook say a word in favor of the DeSoto.  The first plum I ever bought was a DeSoto thirty-five years ago.  I planted it and never saw any brown rot on it and had five bushels on it this year.  George Kellogg saw it; I can prove anything by him. (Laughter.) Talking about Prof.  Hansen’s sand cherry crosses, I have a number of his trees.  I have two in particular that are nice trees.  My wife the last three years has selected her plums from these trees for preserving and canning.  I never saw any brown rot on them.  They are nice trees, and I propose to stick by Hansen as long as he furnishes as good stuff as that.  The locality makes a great difference in this brown rot.  Some of the smaller varieties of Prof.  Hansen the brown rot takes.  As some one has said, it will take the plums and the twigs after the plums are gone.  It may be that the locality has something to do with it.

Mr. Cook:  A year ago I was talking with some gentlemen in the lobby of this hotel here and among them was a gentleman from the Iowa society, and I was trying to urge and tell them about the great value of some of those hybrid plums.  Mr. Reeves said to me:  “Mr. Cook, if you were going out into the woods to live and could only take one variety of plum with you, what variety would you take?” If he said five or six different varieties I would have made a different answer but he said only one variety, and I said it would be the DeSoto, and his answer was, “So would any other man that has right senses about him.”

Mr. Anderson:  It was my pleasure some time ago, I think it was in 1896, to set out a few plum trees, DeSotos, and those trees grew and grew until they bore plums, and I was very much pleased with them.  It was also my fortune about that time to sell plums that another man had grown, such varieties as the Ocheeda, the Wolf and the Wyant.  They were such beautiful plums, and I obtained such beautiful prices for them, I was very much enthused over growing plums.  I purchased a number of trees of that variety, but up to the present time I have never marketed a bushel of plums from any tree of that kind.  The DeSotos bore plums until they died a natural death, which was last year.

Mr. Goudy:  I have one DeSoto in my orchard which is seven years old, never had a plum on it, never had a blossom on it.  What shall I do?  (Laughter.)

Mr. Ludlow:  Cut it out.

Spraying Plums for Brown Rot.

PROF.  E. C. STAKMAN, MINN.  EXP.  STATION, UNIVERSITY FARM, ST. PAUL.

The brown rot of plum is without doubt one of the important limiting factors in plum-growing in Minnesota.  In seasons favorable to its development, losses of from twenty to fifty per cent. of the crop in individual orchards are not uncommon.

Experiments on the control of the disease have been carried on by the sections of “Plant Pathology and Tree Insects and Spraying,” of the Minnesota Experiment Station, since 1911.  No accurate results could be obtained in 1912 and 1915 on account of crop failure in the orchards selected for experiment.  Results are available for the years 1911, 1913 and 1914.