Picking and Packing. 401 



not be wandering over the plantation in search of 

 the best picking. Fig. 90 shows the method of 

 "lining off" cranberry pickers. 



Necessity of hand-picking. It would seem to be 

 unnecessary to say that all fruits which are to be 

 put into a good market should be hand-picked, and 

 yet it is a fact that a great quantity of the apples, 

 and even of the pears and plums, which go into 

 our common markets are shaken from the trees. 

 It is impracticable to grade or sort such fruits, 

 because the proportion of jammed or bruised fruits 

 is so great that the samples of first quality are 

 found to be very few. It is an axiom in fruit- 

 marketing that only the best fruit pays for careful 

 packing, and that the poor fruit is rarely worth the 

 trouble of grading. The better the fruit, therefore, 

 and the more carefully it is picked, the more profit- 

 able may be the attention which is given to sort- 

 ing and packing. 



THE PACKING OF FRUIT. 



What is first-class fruit f The very first thing to 

 be considered in the packing of fruit is to deter- 

 mine what first-class fruit is. Even amongst those 

 persons who sell apples for the export trade, there 

 is very little exact practice in the sorting of the 

 apples. It seems to be ordinarily considered that 

 any fruit which is sound enough to reach its desti- 

 nation is good enough to be called first-class ; 

 but such standard is a serious error. The fruit 



AA 



