GOOD FOR APPLES

Taranaki Daily News, 9 November 1935, Page 18 (Supplement)

GOOD FOR APPLES

CURE FOR CORKY PIT. NEW ZEALAND DISCOVERY. By injecting a little boracic acid into apple trees a New Zealand scientist has found a remedy "for a disease which has for 20 years ruined the crops in many orchards. This is a very important discovery for the fruit-growers of New Zealand, who ship about a million cases of apples to England every year as well as supply New Zealanders with their apple a day. Nowadays doctors trace the causes of many diseases in human beings to lack of some element in food eaten, and so we hear a great deal about the foods we eat because they are rich in vitamins. It is just the same with plants which draw their nourishment from the soil. Some soils are rich and others are poor . in certain elements which the plants absorb.

Working on this idea Mr. J. D. Atkinson, of the Department of Scientific research, has been busy finding out the cause and cure of a disease in apples which fruit-growers call “corky pit.” It results in numerous brown corky areas across the flesh of an apple, especially near the core.,

Two years ago it was suggested that a possible cause of corky pit was a lack of some minerals in the trees producing the apples. Since then Mr. Atkinson has made many experiments, inoculating a large number of trees with a wide variety of chemical solutions. Now. it appears that the cure has been found. Two trees in an orchard had received injections, and when the whole 700 apples from them were cut open they were found to be clean, while ninetenths of the apples on the other trees in the orchard were spoiled by corky pit. Other experiments have convinced the scientists that they have found the remedy for the disease. As far as is known these experiments in New Zealand provide the first evidence of a lack of what chemists call “boron” in orchard soils of the world. Apples affected with corky pit have only one-third of the “boron content” of apples grown on soils not subject to this tree ailment.