r
grafting on apple-stocks, on crab-apples, and on the mountain-ash,
should be utterly discarded. For producing early fruit, quince-stocks
and root-pruning are recommended.

Setting out pear-trees properly is of very great importance. The
requisites are, to have the ground in good condition, from manure on the
crop of the last season, and thoroughly subsoiled and drained.
Pear-trees delight in rather heavy land, if it be well drained; but
water, standing in the soil about them, is utterly ruinous. Pear-trees,
well transplanted on moderately rich land, well subsoiled and well
drained, will almost always succeed. By observing the following brief
directions, any cultivator may have just such shaped tops on his
pear-trees as he desires. Cut short any shoots that are too vigorous,
that those around them may get their share of the sap, and thus be
enabled to make a proportionate growth. After trees have come into
bearing, symmetry in the form of their heads may be promoted by
pinching off all the fruit on the weak branches, and allowing all on the
strong ones to mature.

Those two simple methods, removing the fruit from too vigorous shoots,
and cutting in others, half or two-thirds their length, will enable one
to form just such heads as he pleases, and will prove the best
preventives of diseases.

_Diseases._--There are many insects that infest pear-orchards, in the
same manner as they do apples, and are to be destroyed in the same way.
The slugs on the leaves are often quite annoying. These are worms,
nearly half an inch long, olive-colored, and tapering from head to tail,
like a tadpole. Ashes or quicklime, sprinkled over the leaves when they
are wet with dew or rain, is an effectual remedy.

_Insect-Blight._--This has been confounded with the frozen-sap blight,
though they are very different. In early summer, when the shoots are in
most vigorous growth, you will notice that the leaves on the ends of
branches turn brown, and very soon die and become black. This is caused
by a worm from an egg, deposited just behind or below a bud, by an
insect. The egg hatches, and the worm perforates the bark into the wood,
and commits his depredations there, preventing the healthy flow of the
sap, which kills the twig above. Soon after the shoot dies, the worm
comes out in the form of a winged insect, and seeks a location to
deposite its eggs, preparatory to new depredations. The remedy is to cut
off the shoots affected at once, and