Up to the present, it must be said, but little effort has been made in New York to ship far and to develop a trade in cherries other than at the canneries. The canners have until the last year or two taken the cream of the crop but with recent greatly increased plantings are now over-supplied. The average grower, possessing a mixture of mental inertia and business caution, has not sought other sources for the surplus fruit. Bolder and more energetic spirits are now developing new markets and opening up those to which other tree-fruits more generally go so that the present over-production may prove a blessing in disguise. The greatly increased demand, for Sour Cherries in particular, brought about by the development of markets in 1913-14, are most hopeful signs for the future of the cherry industry. CHERRY DISEASES Cherries, without preventive or remedial intervention, are at the mercy of two or three fungus diseases and sometimes several others are virulent, depending upon locality, season, weather and variety. One of these diseases, brown-rot, in spite of the great advances in plant pathology of recent years, is almost beyond the control of preventive or remedial measures. Happily, all the others yield better to treatment. Brown-rot[55] (_Sclerotinia fructigena_ (Persoon) Schroeter), sometimes known as fruit-mold or ripe-rot, very frequently attacks flowers and shoots but is most conspicuous on the ripe or ripening cherries where its presence is quickly detected by a dark discoloration of the skin which is afterwards partly or wholly covered with pustule-like aggregations of gray spores. The decayed fruits usually fall to the ground but sometimes hang to the tree, becoming shriveled mummies, each mummy being a storehouse of fungus threads and spores from which infestation spreads to the next crop. The disease, in some seasons, like a withering blight, attacks twigs, flowers and leaves early in the spring doing great damage to the young growth and often wholly preventing the setting of fruit. The rot spreads with surprising rapidity on the fruits in warm, damp weather either before the fruit is picked or in baskets while being shipped or stored. Preventive remedies have so far met with but indifferent success; probably the best method of control is to destroy the mummy-like fruits and all other sources of infection either by picking them from the trees, or much better by plowing them under deeply. Varieties of cherries show various degrees of susceptibility to brown-rot. All Sweet Cherries are more subject to the disease than the Sour sorts. But with either of the two species there are great variations in the susceptibility of the varietal hosts--a matter specially noted in a later chapter in the discussion of varieties.