28 MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



be obtained in Minneapolis at twelve cents each in the flats, and can 

 be easily nailed up at the home. 



For marketing plums there is nothing- neater or better than 

 the Western package, which holds four baskets of five pounds each, 

 making twenty pounds to the crate. The fruit should be placed in 

 the basket in layers, with clean white wrapping paper between each 

 layer and over the top. This makes a package of convenient size 

 and one that is familiar to the trade, and can be had in Minneapolis 

 at ten cents each or $9.00 per hundred. 



For raspberries we recommend the pint wine measure, twenty- 

 four to the crate, each box 4^ inches square and i^^ inches deep, 

 inside measure. 



For strawberries, currants, blackberries and gooseberries the 

 wine measure quart box, 4^^ inches square by 3 inches deep, inside 

 measure, either sixteen or twenty-four to the crate. Boxes of the 

 dimensions given, well filled and put up in good clean crates, will 

 sell far more readily and command a better price than the second 

 hand or weather stained boxes and crates that are so often placed 

 upon the market. 



The practice among some fruit growers of marketing their 

 fruit in second hand crates or barrels that have been picked up at 

 the grocery store or about the barn or granery, without regard to 

 their sanitary condition, is pernicious and should be prohibited. In 

 the Western states laws have been passed making it a misdemeanor 

 to use a fruit package the second time. And when we realize that 

 fruit never brings its full value in an old, weather stained or second 

 hand package it is easy to see that there is nothing saved by its 

 use, and that the new, clean package more than pays for itself in 

 the higher price obtained for the fruit. 



It may seem a little premature for your committee to offer sug- 

 gestions as to a proper package in which to market oranges, but it 

 may not be uninteresting to know that a prominent fruit grower of 

 Louisiana after some ten years of experimenting has produced an 

 orange which he claims will flourish and bear delicious fruit even 

 in a climate where the temperature goes below zero. It seems like 

 a fairy tale to talk about growing shiny leaved trees laden with 

 golden fruit on the shores of Lake Minnetonka, but this is by no 

 means an impossibility. Quite as strange things in other varieties 

 of fruit have been brought about by members of our Minnesota 

 Horticultural Society. 



R. A. WRIGHT. 

 L. LONGFELLOW, 



Committee. 



