16 PROFITS OF FRUIT CULTURE. 



But the anxious inquiry is suggested, " Will not our mar- 

 kets be surfeited with fruit?" This will depend upon the 

 judgment and discretion of cultivators. With the excep- 

 tion of the peaches of Philadelphia, and the strawberries 

 of Cincinnati, a great deficiency is still felt in all our large 

 cities. Of these two fruits, large plantations are brought 

 rapidly into full bearing. The fruit, when ripe, quickly 

 perishes, and cannot be kept a week ; yet thousands of acres 

 in peach trees, bending under their heavy crops,-are needed 

 for the consumption of the one city, and broad fifty-acre fields, 

 reddened with enormous products, send many hundred bush- 

 els of strawberries daily into the other. If, instead of keep- 

 ing but three days, sorts were now added which would keep 

 three months, many times the amount would be needed. 

 But the market would not be confined to large cities. Rail- 

 roads and steamboats would open new channels of distribu- 

 tion throughout the country, for increased supplies. Nor 

 would the business stop here. Large portions of the eastern 

 continent would gladly become purchasers, as soon as suffi- 

 cient quantities should create facilities for a resonable sup- 

 ply. Our best apples are already eagerly bought in London 

 and Liverpool, where nine dollars per barrel is not an unu- 

 sual price for the best J^ewtown pippins. And by packing 

 in ice, Doyenne pears, gathered early in autumn in New- 

 York, have been sold at mid-winter in Calcutta peaches 

 have been safely sent to Jamaica and strawberries to Bar- 

 badoes. The Baldwin apple has been furnished in good 

 condition in the East Indies, two months after it is entirely 

 gone at Boston.* 



Good winter apples always command a market. For the 

 past thirty years such fine varieties as the Swaar, Rhode 

 Island Greening, and Esopus Spitzenburgh, have scarcely 

 varied from twenty-five cents a bushel in some of the most 

 productive portions of the country, remote from market. 

 Late keepers are sold early in the summer for more than 

 triple that sum. An acre of forty trees, with good culture, 

 will average through all seasons not less than two hundred 

 bushels, or fifty dollars a year. Instances are frequent of 

 thrice this amount. The farmer, then, who sets out twenty 

 acres of good apple orchard, and takes care of it, may expect 



* Hort. vol. I, p. 288. 



