PACKAGES, TRAINING, POLLINATION 77 



placed upon a woman's head, on a small cushion. She 

 trudges miles with it to market." 1 



Another type of splint basket, called a punnet, was 

 used in the strawberry trade of New York City between 

 1815 and 1850. The English punnet used in America 

 was a shallow basket of woven wickerwork without 

 handles (Fig. 5). A handled punnet was more popular in 

 the New York market. C. W. 

 Idell relates: 2 "The first straw- 

 berries marketed in New York were 

 wild ones from Bergen County, 

 N. J. The negroes were the first 

 to pick this fruit for the New York 

 market and invented those quaint 

 old-fashioned splint baskets with 

 handles. The baskets were strung 

 on poles and thus peddled through the city." Originally 

 the punnets were supposed to hold about a pint each, but 

 eventually they became very uncertain as to size ; many 

 held less than half a pint. 



About 1820, commercial strawberry growing for the 

 New York market began in the vicinity of Hackensack, 

 New Jersey. The berries were packed in punnets without 

 handles ; these were packed in large hampers. They were 

 returned to the shipper when emptied. The problem of 

 standardizing the cubic contents of fruit packages is not 

 modern, as is evident from a market report of 1847: 3 

 "The milk train of Tuesday night took to New York 

 80,000 baskets of strawberries. These are intended to 



1 Trans. Hort. Soc. of London, VI (1826), p. 513; also The 

 Cultivator, 1835, p. 81. 



2 Proc. N. J. Hort. Soc., 1877, p. 26. 



3 American Agriculturist, 1847, p. 260. 



