Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 4, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 October 1874 — The Cause of Yellows in Peach Trees. [ARTICLE]

The Cause of Yellows in Peach Trees.

Whatever may be or may not be the cause of the yellows in peach trees, one thing 1s reliable, namely: If a liberal, quantity of lime be spread about some trees, and wood ashes or dissolved potash around other trees, on a different soil, the yellows will disappear. This has been proven of er and over again, until all doubts have been removed. Concerning this subject Thomas Meehan writes that if you .dig around a peach with the yellows, you will be first struck with a mushroomy smell. Pickingout the roots and examining them with a lens you will see millions of thread-like fibers, which are the mycelia of fungi. These eat the young fibers, and leave only the main roots,"through which all the nutriment of the plant has to be gathered; and as an old root is unable to do much more than draw in water, the tree becqmes in a measure starved, and the leaves become yellow, just as they would be if growing in poor soil, which, though the plant might have plenty of roots, furnished nothing for the roots to eat. To have plenty of roots and no food is equivalent to having plenty of food and no roots. The effect on the plant is just the same. Remedies which look to the destruction of this root paranite are employed. Hot nyater has done it; so has a weak solution of salt. Others have found a solution of potash subceed. The exact nature of this fungus, so far as we know,has not been investigated to entire satisfaction. KFungi are very polymorphous. This one may enter into the circulation of the plant, and exist in that case as an apparently distinct species, extending through the tissue and destroying it as it goes. This seems likely from some experiments by Mr. Thomas Taylor, of the Department of Agriculture. At any rate it is generally believed that a bud, or even a knife used in pruning a deceased tree, will communicate the disease to a healthy one.— New York Herald - —A Bostonian just returned from abroad traveled 20.000 miles within the last year without changing a day’s programme for bad weather, and never for seven fiionths unstrapping his umbrella.