Time is a very essential element in spraying.  To give you an illustration:  A few years ago, in spraying a Willow Twig orchard, consisting of eighteen rows of trees, I sprayed nine rows of those trees, or about half of the orchard, we will say, the first part of the week, the first two days.  And then there came on a two or three days’ rain, and the balance of those eighteen rows was sprayed the very last of the week or the first of the following week.  The two following sprayings went on just at the right time for them, but when it came to the harvesting of that crop the trees that were sprayed first, that were sprayed immediately after the bloom fell, produced 175 bushels of very fine No. 1 fruit, free from scab, while the other nine rows, equal in every respect so far as the trees are concerned and the amount of bloom there was, produced seventeen bushels of No. 2 fruit, no No. 1 fruit at all.

The Willow Twig is one of those varieties that is very susceptible to scab, and of course this is a marked illustration of what happens if you don’t spray at the right time.  Notwithstanding the fact that the nine rows, the last ones, I speak of, were sprayed with the two following sprays at the same time that the other part of the orchard was sprayed, the results were entirely different because the first spraying, which was really the important one so far as the scab is concerned, was not put upon the tree at the right time.

The scab fungus, which seems to appear on your apples out here, is one of the most insidious diseases we have in the whole fruit industry.  I think that scab fungous disease is probably the one that affects you the most.  Now, scab fungus will not be noticed particularly in the spring of the year.  The time that those spores are most prevalent, the period of their movement as spores in the atmosphere and the lodging upon the fruit, is right at the beginning, right about the time of the blossoming or immediately following.  For a period of about two weeks at blooming time and after is the time that you have that condition.

And the trouble is—­it is just like typhoid fever.  You let typhoid fever get into a family, and they do not think anything of it except to take care of the patient properly if he has it, but it doesn’t scare the neighbors, it does not interest them.  But let the smallpox break out in a community, and everybody is interested and scared to death for fear they are going to get the smallpox.

Well now, as compared with things of a fungous nature, the scab is a good deal like typhoid fever.  The latter is insidious and it will destroy more—­I take it there are more people die in the United States of typhoid fever every year than die of smallpox, ten to one.  I haven’t the statistics but I have that in mind, that it is a fact that they do, and yet there isn’t half the fuss made about typhoid fever that there is about smallpox.