44 STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY, 



THE SELLING OF OUR FRUIT— HOW TO FIND THE 



MARKET FOR SMALL FRUITS. 



By A. A. Eastman, Dexter. 



First you must have a good location near a local market and 

 shipping station. In order to succeed in this as in any other 

 business it is absolutely necessary to keep thoroughly up with the 

 times. The picking and gathering of fruit is another important 

 point to know, the proper time and stages of development to 

 gather the fruit according to your market. The small fruits 

 should be picked in the cool part of the day and at once put in a 

 cool place, and not picked when wet with dew or rain, the fruit 

 will soon spoil and be worthless. But if you are close to a local 

 market get out early and pick the fruit with the dew on and have 

 it on the market early as possible. Do not send fruit of poor 

 grades to market, have the small fruit graded by the pickers, as 

 it is hardly possible to assort afterwards, and see that all your 

 fruit is up to an established standard. 



Sell these as first-class goods and if you market the seconds 

 mark them as seconds. As to the manner of selling this is a local 

 question. If you are close to a small town sell direct to the con- 

 sumer, but endeavor to have the man who handles your fruit in 

 touch with you. If you are obliged to ship to a commission mer- 

 chant get him acquainted with your fruit, go and see him and get 

 acquainted with what he is doing in the markets. Establish 

 confidence between yourself and your dealer and then do nothing 

 to shake that confidence. Just how you will do this will depend 

 upon yourself. While fruits are the most profitable source of 

 revenue from a farm they might in many cases yield double the 

 profit if they were marketed in a proper manner. The trouble 

 with fruit growers in Maine and New England States, is they do 

 not make a business of it as a rule. You do not want to mix 

 farming in with small fruit culture but very little. If a person 

 is farming he wants to raise what small fruit is needed in his 

 family ; if he is making a business of small fruit culture he can- 

 not attend to farming and make it pay as a rule. Farmers fre- 

 quently complain that they fail to get satisfactory prices for their 

 products and find fault with dealers because they will pay no 

 more when in reality the trouble lies with themselves. The sale 



