AGRICULTURE AND SOILS OF CALIFORNIA. 501 
of shrubbery and flowers—and among them many that he has so far 
‘seen only nurtured in greenhouses—will enable him to create around 
him in the course of three seasons, on a bare lot, a home atmosphere 
that elsewhere it would have required ten or more years to establish. 
The housewife, however industriously disposed, is not ill-pleased to find 
herself relieved from the annual pressure of the “ preserving season ” 
by the circumstance that fresh fruits are in the market at reasonable 
rates during all but a few weeks in the year; so that a few gallons of 
jellies is all that is really called for in the way of “putting up.” It is 
not less pleasing to her, as well as to the rest of the family, that a good 
supply of fresh vegetables is at her command at all seasons, and that 
the Christmas dinner, if the turkey does cost 30 cents a pound, may be 
graced with crisp lettuce, radishes, and green peas just as readily as it may 
be celebrated by an open-air picnic on the green grass under blooming 
bushes of the scarlet gooseberry. Of course there are seasons of prefer- 
ence for each vegetable, but among the great variety naturally intro- 
duced by the various nationalities there are few that cannot be found 
in the San Francisco market at almost any time in the year—if not 
from local culture, then from some point between Los Angeles and 
the mouth of the Columbia. The truck-gardens are largely in the hands 
of the Italians and Portuguese, who have brought with them from their 
home habits of thrift; and their manure piles, windmills for irrigation, 
and laborious care of their unceasing round of crops on a small area, 
render their establishments easy of recognition. Their products are 
distributed partly by themselves, partly by the ubiquitous Chinese 
huckster, trotting with his two huge baskets under a weight that few 
Caucasians would carry for any length of time. Not a few Chinese also 
are engaged in the truck-farmiig business. The vegetables are in gen- 
eral of excellent quality, and it may be truly said that in no city in the 
United States is the general quality of fare so good, so well adapted to 
every variety of taste, and, last but not least, so cheap, as in the city of 
the Golden Gate; and nowhere is the decoration of even the humblest 
homes with flowers and shrubbery more universal and at the same time 
so generously aided by nature. 
In no department of industry, probably, is the reputation of Califor- 
nia better established than in regard to fruit culture. Its pears seem to 
have been the pioneers in gaining the award of special excellence; grapes 
and cherries have rapidly taken a place alongside, and, last, oranges 
and lemons have come to dispute the palm with Sicily and the Antilles. 
The most striking peculiarity of California fruit culture is its astonish- 
ing versatility, not to say cosmopolitanism; for the variety of fruits 
capable of successful euiture within the limits under consideration in 
this article probably exceeds, even at this time, that found elsewhere in 
any country of similar extent, and is constantly on the increase by the 
introduction of new kinds from all quarters of the globe. Doubtless, in 
time, each district will settle down to the more or less exclusive produc- 
tion of certain kinds found to be most profitable under its particular cir- 
cumstances, so far as the large-scale cultures are concerned; but who- 
soever raises fruit mainly for home consumption will hardly resist the 
temptation offered by the possibility of growing side by side the fruits 
of the tropics and those of the north temperate zone—the currant and 
the orange, the cherry and the fig, the strawberry and the pineapple, 
the banana and plantain, as well as the apple and the medlar. It 
would be supposed that the quality of these products must of necessity 
suffer grievously under the stress of their mutual concessions of habit; 
and this, of course, is true as regards the highest qualities of the ex- 
