Grading and Packing Fruit 55 



With profound apologies to our Evesham friends and their "pot", it 

 may be said with confidence that a bushel is the largest measure in which 

 fruit of any kind should be sent to market, and this only for cooking 

 apples and the harder sorts of pear. For plums, dessert apples, and the 

 better kinds of pear the -bus. is the largest measure that should be used; 

 for ripe plums a smaller measure still is desirable, and where apples and 

 pears are grown clean and good there should be many that it will pay to 

 send up in single-layer trays to be sold by the dozen. 



Where fruit has to be sent long distances the inconvenience and expense 

 of returning empties has turned many minds to the task of devising a 

 package which shall be strong enough to stand the knocking about of 

 travel, and yet be low enough in price to admit of being given away with 

 the fruit; thus have come about what are called " non-re turnables". 



From the point of view of the grower who provides his own baskets 

 the question is one for serious consideration. What happens to the baskets 

 is generally this: the grower sells his fruit at market to a "packer", who 

 sends it away to retailers at seaside places or provincial towns, leaving 

 with the grower Is. on each basket. The retailer has purchased an 

 orchard or two of fruit of the kind one sees close to almost every farmhouse 

 in the country. When he has sold the fruit out of the basket received 

 from the sender he keeps it and uses it for gathering his purchased fruit. 

 It is true he has left Is. on it with the packer; but there is no time limit, 

 and he can get his shilling back whenever he returns the basket, so long 

 as it can just hold together enough to be called a basket. Consequently, 

 when all his purchased fruit has been disposed of, and when the basket 

 which he received from the packer new is more than three parts worn out, 

 he sends it back and claims his shilling. The grower, about mid-winter, 

 when marketings are slack and funds low, gets numbers of rickety baskets 

 back which went out of his place new, and out of which he has only had 

 the use of one journey, each one carrying a demand for a shilling. All 

 through his busy season he has had to keep supplying new baskets for 

 his fruit. It is no wonder, therefore, that the idea of non-returnables 

 found the grower ready to regard it as a business proposition. To get rid 

 of the " empty " question was worth giving away a fourpenny box with a 

 half -bushel of fruit and a sixpenny one with a bushel; if competition 

 brought the prices lower, so much the better. For the packer, one cannot 

 imagine a more desirable reform. In the case of fruit in baskets he must 

 provide packing and staves, and men to stave each basket securely down 

 in the vain endeavour to guard against "plunging", as pilfering en route 

 is called. With the non-returnable box the whole of this is saved, plunder- 

 ing is impossible, and, last but not least, the anxiety, expense, and trouble 

 of dealing with empties is entirely obviated. For the retailer at the other 

 end the fruit comes in a non-resilient package and consequently less liable 

 to damage in transit from rubbing. The package is good enough, when 

 empty, to go several times to get fruit from his purchased orchards, and can 

 afterwards be used for the humble but necessary purpose of lighting the 



