ii6 



THE CANADIAN HORTICULTURIST. 



date. Then I visited the leading towns in 

 Connecticut, Massachussetts, and Rhode 

 Island, seeking out in each town one retail 

 grocer or fruit dealer who handled high- 

 grade goods. To him I told my litlle story 

 of soil and variety selection, tillage, pruning, 

 fertilizing and fruit thinning. I told him 

 how the fruit was being gathered fully ripe, 

 day by day, as it came to maturity, carefully 

 assorted in three sizes, rejecting all unsound 

 or imperfect specimens, packing the fruit 

 in new baskets made of the whitest wood 

 obtainable, every basket to be rounding full 

 of perfect fruit of the grade, and guarantee- 

 ing uniformity of packing ; that I was job 

 bing the fruit myself; that prices would 

 probably be twenty-five or fifty per cent, 

 above the market rates, but that the fruit 

 would be worth it ; and that I was prepared 

 to give an exclusive agency to the one 

 dealer in each town who would push the 

 goods into the best family trade. 



When the crop began to come in, liberal 

 advertising in the Hartford papers started 

 sales at once. The few outside trial orders 

 gave such satisfaction that orders came 

 pouring in faster than there were peaches to 

 supply them, so that after the first week of 

 the season the daily orders were far in ex- 

 cess of the supply, and prices were advanced 

 to "what the traffic would bear." It was 

 all cash trade, too. 



With a girl to book orders and look after 

 the cash, one boy and I worked in the store 

 every night from six to eleven, taking the 

 fruit from the wagons as they came from 

 the farm, and making up the out-of-town 

 orders. And again at four a. m. we sup- 

 plied the Hartford and local trade, after 

 which came a drive of eight miles out to the 

 farm, there to spend the day assisting at the 

 harvest or toning up of the weak places in 

 the plan of picking, assorting and packing. 

 I soon found that men, however honest, 

 would occasionally sneak the best peaches 

 to the top of the baskets, and that women, 



with quicker eye, defter fingers, and natural 

 honesty, made the best graders and packers. 



Long days, hard work and lots of fun 

 there were in that first crop, but the great- 

 est pleasure of all was the signing of what 

 then seemed a big check for $2,100 that 

 paid off the mortgage on the farm, and gave 

 the mortgagee a chance to re-lend the 

 money on a Kansas farm 1,500 miles away, 

 where they could not see the borrower daily 

 if he should depart from the orthodox ways 

 of the neighborhood to branch ofi" into the 

 heresy of a new agriculture. 



The peach harvest rounded up nearly 

 $10,000 profit, from a farm that my neigh- 

 bors thought three months before was not 

 good security for a loan of $2,000. All 

 other debts were paid, and the entire surplus 

 was promptly invested in fertilizers for the 

 orchard. Winter's frost destroyed all hopes 

 of a crop the next season, and money had to 

 be borrowed to keep things going ; but only 

 for a little while, for 1889 gave a banner 

 crop of superb fruit, which, marketed as be- 

 fore, gave net profits from thirty-five acres 

 of over $24,000. Such a fruit harvest was 

 a novel sight in New England, and dealers, 

 consumers and land owners from far and 

 near flocked to the orchards by the hun- 

 dreds each day. New England leceived a 

 stimulus in peach growing, resulting in the 

 planting of over 200,000 trees in the season 

 of 1890. Continued planting since shows at 

 the present time over 3,000,000 trees in the 

 peach orchards of Connecticut, more than 

 100,000 in Rhode Island, 300,000 in Massa- 

 chusetts, and not less than 50,000 in south- 

 ern counties of New Hampshire. 



My own planting has at least kept pace 

 with the rest, so that now 50,000 trees in 

 Connecticut alone represent the outgrowth 

 of the '* crazy " scheme of twenty-five years 

 ago. Rocky hills and semi-abandoned 

 brush pastures have been purchased ; woods, 

 rocks and stumps have been cleared away at 

 an expense'often exceeding five and even 



