. The Country gentleman's magazine. Agriculture; Agriculture -- Great Britain. The Ccmitry Gcntlanaiis Magadnc 265 INSECTS IN PREMATUREL Y FALLEN FRUIT. OF the many insects which in one stage or other of their existence feed upon the wood, bark, leaves, flowers, and fruit of our orchard and garden trees or bushes, those numerous as well as destructive kinds which penetrate, and so cause the premature falling of the young fruit, demand special attention during the summer months at the hands of careful growers, with the view of accomplishing their destruction as far as possible, and consequently
. The Country gentleman's magazine. Agriculture; Agriculture -- Great Britain. The Ccmitry Gcntlanaiis Magadnc 265 INSECTS IN PREMATUREL Y FALLEN FRUIT. OF the many insects which in one stage or other of their existence feed upon the wood, bark, leaves, flowers, and fruit of our orchard and garden trees or bushes, those numerous as well as destructive kinds which penetrate, and so cause the premature falling of the young fruit, demand special attention during the summer months at the hands of careful growers, with the view of accomplishing their destruction as far as possible, and consequently lessening the virulency of their future attacks. "When a good wood-ripening and blossom- bud forming autumn is succeeded by a mo- derately mild winter, and a favourable bloom- ing as well as fruit-setting spring, nature occasionally assists the requisite process of thinning, by thrusting off many of the young fruit at or shortly before the commencement of what is technically called its second or final swelling, which is equivalent to the stoning or hardening of the seed shells in plums, cherries, and other stone fruit. This thinning process, although not unfrequently assisted by insect agency, is usually looked upon approvingly rather than otherwise; but the case is very different, when at like stages of advancement thinly-set fruit is seen tumbling down till a very scanty, or scarcely no crop is left—an unsatisfactory state of things, for which the weather, blight, or lightning are usually but very often wrongly blamed in- stead of insects, for the destructive abundance of which cultivators are themselves very much to blame. The very apparent mischief caused by leaf- destroying insects, such as the gooseberry caterpillar, the web-fonning apple caterpillar, saw flies, aphid^e, red spiders, and many others that might be named, as well as bark- peeling beetles, branch-and fruit-disfiguring mussel-scales, &c., marks them out as subjects for extirpation, while the less
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