2G8 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



and succcsbfiil fruit growers in that conntry. We found him in 

 his extensive and well-arranged fruit-packing house, preparing 

 apricots, cherries, early phlms, pears and currants for market. 

 All were remarkably fine. He had sent that morning to San 

 Francisco, cherries that measured three and three-fourths inches 

 in circumference, and counted thirty-six to the pound. He 

 sends annually about 65,000 pounds of cherries at from ten to 

 forty cents per pound, though some of the earliest had brought 

 seventy-five cents per pound. All are sold in San Francisco, 

 the Black Tartarian always securing the highest price. He has 

 forty acres, of cherry currants ; the bushes were covered with 

 masses of fruit of enormous size. He has sold 140,000 pounds 

 in one year at from nine to eleven cents per pound. The cur- 

 rants are trained in bush form on single stems, and the branch- 

 es are carefully shortened during the growing season, to keep 

 them compact and prevent breaking down. Of blackberries he 

 has eight or ten acres, all Lawton. Generally this berry does 

 not succeed as well as at the East, though we saw exceptions, 

 td Avhich we will refer hereafter. Pears are packed in fifty- 

 pound and apples in sixty-pound boxes. Pears thrive here 

 grandly ; and he has raised the Pound or Uvedale's St. Ger- 

 main, weighing four pounds throe ounces. 



Almonds arc grown to great size, in lines of half a mile, both 

 in the tree and fruit. AVe saw one tree fourteen years old, 

 fifteen inches in diameter, that has yielded three bushels, which 

 were sold at twenty-eight cents per pound. He has 2,000 trees 

 on his grounds. The English walnut succeeds as well, and 

 some of the trees are already large enough to bear two bushels 

 of nuts each. 



The sugar beet in this luxuriant soil attains to fully twice the 

 size and weight it does with us in one season. We heard of 

 single ones weighing 118 pounds. A company has been organ- 

 ized here for manufacturing beet sugar ; and this same estab- 

 lishment proposes to unite the manufacture, on their own 

 grdinnds, of currant jelly, which is so extensively put up in San 

 Francisco. 



In Napa valley we examined an orchard containing 100 acres; 

 Here wc saw a fine apple orchard, one of the best in that 

 vicinity. The Early Harvest and Red Astrachan were fit to 

 gather. William's Favorite was largely planted, and looked 



