WORLD ACHIEVEMENT

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIX, Issue 194, 18 July 1939, Page 9

WORLD ACHIEVEMENT

BLACKCURRANTS, FOR INSTANCE

The fruit growing world does well to know something of East Mailing, in Kent. It is at East Mailing that we find a research station where fruits arc studied with infinite care, and where j experiments of all sorts are carried out on 100 acres of soil. There is a staff of about 30, and everyone has plenty to do. What they do does not win universal applause, but that is only because the public know so little about it. The East Mailing Research Station was established about 2G years ago, and its task to-day is to know everything there is to know about the best ways of growing fruits and transporting them. Eow of us realise how much our health and happiness depend on the work of research bodies like.this one. To most of us plums are plums and raspberries arc raspberries, but when wo study the reports of East Mailing we discover how much there is to know about fruits, how many diseases they suffer from, how important it is to protect them from enemies, how greatly any one fruit can be improved by scientific cultivation. Take blackcurrants, for instance. The specialists at East Mailing discovered that all our varieties of raspberries and currants are muddled up and misnamed. One man’s Relic do Roskoon blackcurrant was another man’s Baldwin currant; while at least eight, varieties of raspberry were masemorading under the name of Baumforth’s Seedling.

The next thing was to track down the source of a disease which was spreading alarmingly among blackcurrants. Tile big bud mite was found to be the cause and now a spray is used against it, with splendid results.—(L).