174 REPORT OF STATE BOARD OP HORTICULTURE. 



from Rev. E. A. Parrish's, were eagerly bought at $3 per bushel, the seeds 

 so secured being the most prized part of the purchase. It seemed in the 

 nature of a special providence that Mr. Luelliug's venture and intelligent 

 care began to produce specimens in 1849. Families who had beds of seedling 

 apples readily sold all they would spare. These were transplanted with 

 care and head-grafted, so that no time was lost. Where wild stock could be 

 used, as the native thorn for the pear, or the crab for the apple, they were 

 sometimes used with excellent results. Yearling or two-year-old nursery 

 trees of choice varieties of apples were eagerly bought at fifty cents to $1 

 per plant, and prunings of the roots and branches or shoots used by the root- 

 grafting process to make several more trees without perceptible injury to 

 the purchase. So with pears, for Avhich $2 per plant was freely paid, when 

 the bud giving its chief value was yet a bud only. 



Prices for the first fruit sold in California amply justified these prices for 

 nursery trees, as, if a man and woman were passing Luelling's retail fruit 

 stand in San Francisco at any time between 1849 to 1859, and the lady looked 

 interested at the beautiful specimens, she got her choice without regard to 

 cost. Five dollars was sometimes paid for a single apple, and as late as 1856 

 Esopus Spitzenbergs, of average size, retailed from the stand at seventy-five 

 cents each. 



The writer sold his first crop of apples and pears on the trees at fourteen 

 cents per pound. The purchaser picked them, packed them in light boxes 

 with moss, and hauled to the mining camps of Northern California, selling 

 such pears as the Seckle at $4 per pound. His second and third year's 

 crops were picked without bruising, packed in boxes of forty-five pounds 

 each, and hauled by wagon to Portland, selling at twelve and ten cents per 

 pound in 1854 and 1855 resijectively. 



These prices, of course, stimulated great care and devotion to fruit cul- 

 ture, and in addition to its being a new field of observation and interested 

 labor, there was a very general belief that we would always have the Cali- 

 fornia market — that the climate of that state would never admit of the suc- 

 cessful culture of apples, peai's, j^lums and cherries. There were few natural 

 enemies to perfect fruit production, and more blemishes from sun scald than 

 any other climatic cause. But by 1856 orchard planting began in California. 

 Foothill lands and those near the rivers being at first selected for the fruits 

 I have mentioned: and even before these orchards began to bear, the rapid 

 increase of Oregon's product began to lessen prices in California. Then, 

 other fruits sought the golden market, and as early as 1856 monstrous fruits 

 of the pear kind from Japan were in San Francisco markets. The Japanese 

 pears had more the flavor of an indifferent turnii) than of such fruit as the 

 Bartlett pear. In ten years fi^om 1850 apples and pears in the California 

 market were not selling at much, if any, more profit on the labor of produc- 

 tion than wheat farming would give, so that it was wise counsel the Oregonian 

 gave Oregon farmers when it urged the expansion of wheat fields, so as to 

 get into the world's markets with breadstuifs. Extensive orchards began to 

 be neglected when not situated convenient to local market, or in the owner- 

 ship of those who were fruitgrowers from love of the occupation, and pursued 

 it, profit or no profit. Some, like the writer, kept on as long as choice cider 



