68 AGRICULTURE 01? MAINE. 



this is happening when there are thousands of barrels of apples 

 unsold in Maine. This matter of sorting and packing apples 

 is one of the most important problems that we must meet. In 

 my own county the past season, there has been a general scrabble 

 to get barrels, and anything that was round and had hoops 

 enough to hold it together answered the purpose. I have thought 

 many times how these filthy barrels would look beside the neat, 

 clean boxes from California, with their carefully wrapped fruit. 

 Yet our fruit is better, but the buyer here, as elsewhere, is gov- 

 erned by the looks. The freight charges on a carload of fruit 

 from California to Boston or New York cannot be less than $400 

 to $500, and yet this fruit is selling in the markets only 200 to 

 300 miles away from us. The imperative demand will be for 

 the best fruit put up in the most attractive style. Most of the 

 commission men seem to favor barrels for Maine apples, yet in 

 Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and Boston too 

 I think, they are selling Western (California) apples for more 

 money than ours are selling for. You must work out this 

 problem. 



There is another problem, — perhaps as I have presented the 

 subject, it is only a part of the last. It is the storage of the 

 fruit before it is shipped to market. Mr. John W. Clark of 

 North Hadley, Mass., in his talks to the farmers last fall gave 

 some very good advice upon this subject. It is important, as 

 he says, to provide in some way for good storage. The New 

 York people placed some over 300 barrels of fruit in cold storage 

 in the fall of 1900 for the Pan-American Exposition. I regard 

 their figures as more valuable than ours, as the data were more 

 accurate and the fruit was stored much earlier. Of these vari- 

 eties — there were 345 — the best keepers were Gano, Ben Davis, 

 Esopus Spitzenburg (Schoharie Valley), Baldwin, Spy (grown 

 in sod), Boiken, Bethel, Coopers Market, R. I. Greening, Jona- 

 than, Fameuse, Rome Beauty, Mcintosh Red, Canada Red, 

 Russet and Red Romanite. One barrel of the Yellow Bellflower 

 came from cold storage on May 20th, with a loss of onlv four 

 per cent, and the best specimens held up on the exhibition tables 

 for more than two weeks. This fruit, with the exception of a 

 few barrels for experiment, was all wrapped. These barrels 

 were stored in the same place and received the same treatment 

 as the others. Up to the first of May they kept in remarkablv 



