Miscellaneous. 389 



quicker. Anybody can make a box. The lumber can be obtained in 

 winter in shooks, and the boxes made in stormy weather, without any 

 expense piled up on account of barrel trusts or skilled workmanship. 



Prof. Craig said he saw Spitzenburg apples sold from a box in a 

 New York store "two for a quarter," and the bushel boxes were retailed 

 at $5 each. A whole carload was as near alike as peas in a pod, and a 

 box taken at random could be guaranteed to be as good as any other. 

 It is such uniformity and conscientiousness in packing which gives a 

 brand a reputation and a selling price far above what it costs to produce 

 and pack. He would not pack seconds in boxes, or mixed or inferior 

 fruit, expecting to get fancy prices. The size of the box used in Canada 

 was II by 11 by 20 inches, holding a bushel. He spoke of western com- 

 petition and .the rapidity with which some states were coming to the 

 front in apple production ; 667,000 boxes of apples were grown in Colo- 

 rado last year; yet there are growers in New York who imagine that 

 Colorado is and always will be wholly a consumer of fruit grown in 

 other states. New Yorkers have a very short haul to the seaboard, and 

 if they will adopt uniform packages and the carefulness of the far west 

 in packing, they can hold the export business and make money just on 

 the difference in freight. 



Mr. Powell has spent a good deal of time investigating the big 

 eastern mairkets and interviewing dealers. One dealer thought that per- 

 haps a family trade might be built up in bushel boxes of fancy apples 

 carefully wrapped in fancy wrappers, but there had not been enough of 

 that sort of goods handled yet to demonstrate its practicability. 



Mr. Smith was somewhat pessimistic in his views of the new ways. 

 The barrel was good enough for him. It could be rolled and could be 

 quickly packed at a time when help was scarce and the season was crowd- 

 ing. It would cost all the extra price to wrap each apple, put a man 

 way behind with his orchard work, and in many cases be sihiply imprac- 

 ticable. 



Mr. Hamman reiterated his previous statements, urging Mr. Smith's 

 attention to the fact that the boxing method distributed labor through 

 stormy weather and did not delay outdoor work. The boxes were filled 

 with the fruit from the picking baskets and taken at once, or before night, 

 to cellar or barn or storage room and piled up, to stand until stormy 

 weather or the end of the picking gave time to sort and pack. There 

 was less handling, less waste and less anxiety from weather changes 

 than when apples were put in heaps on the barn floor or in the orchard. 



As regards boxes, Mr. Van Deman said that the Oregon growers 

 m.ade one size of box, but of two forms, one being wider and narrower 



