182 .RESOURCES OF CALIFORNIA. 



and thus i^repared, they will be superior to any of the Euro- 

 pean hops. 



The Chinese sugar-cane grows luxuriantly in this state, but 

 it is not extensively cultivated. 



Flax, hemp, and the basket-willow, are not cultivated, or in 

 patches so small as to be unworthy of notice. 



§ 143. Kitchen Vegetables. — The vegetables for the kitchen 

 — such as cabbage, cauliflower, beets, parsnips, carrots, rad- 

 ishes, onions, melons, squashes, pumpkins, green peas, string- 

 beans, tomatoes, asparagus, rhubarb, okra, cucumbers, lettuce, 

 garden-egg, and so forth — thrive in California, many of them 

 beyond example elsewhere. Cabbages weighing fifteen j^ounds 

 are wonders in the Xevr York market ; in San Francisco they 

 are common. Whole fields of cabbage-heads, weighing twenty 

 pounds each, have been grown ; and hard, sohd heads, with no 

 loose leaves, weighing forty-five and fifty-three pounds each, 

 are on record. One cabbage, which did not make a head, 

 grew to be seven feet wide, throwing out leaves three and a 

 half feet long on each side. In many cases the cabbage has 

 been converted into a perennial, evergreen, tree-like plant, by 

 preventing it from going to seed. Several of these are now 

 growing in the state, with stalks from two to six feet high, 

 and a foliage that grows through vrinter and summer. 



The largest squash or soft-skin pumpkin produced in Cali- 

 fornia weighed two hundred and sixty pounds, and the vine 

 which bore it had several others weighing over one hundred 

 pounds each; the total weight of its fruit being more than 

 eight hundred pounds ! Elsewhere, sixty pounds is a very large 

 pumpkin or squash ; and th^re is scarcely a record in the At- 

 lantic states of a greater weight than one hundred pounds, 

 which has been frequently surpassed here. In 1857, one 

 squash-vine on the ranch of James Simmons, in Yuba county, 

 produced one hundred and thirty squashes, weighing in all 

 twenty-six hundred and four pounds ! In the same year, J. Q. 

 A. Ballon, at San Jose, grew two squashes, weighing two hun- 

 dred and ten and two hundred and four pounds respectively. 



