172 TJie Cherry as a Profitable Fruit for Market-Purposes. 



do you find a cottage log-house, the remains of an abandoned home, or 

 ' the fresh pahit of a new settler or naturalized foreigner, without finding 

 more or less cherry-trees growing ? True, some of them are what we call 

 sour or Kentish fruit ; but they are hardy and productive. Orchards by the 

 thousands of trees are growing and being planted in the Western States, 

 while orchards of trees numbering their hundreds are frequent in the 

 Middle and Northern States : but, with all these, our statement, that, in 

 many small cities and market-towns, cherries are never found for sale, holds 

 good ; while in the larger cities it is rare that the market is ever fully sup- 

 plied ; and hence many a person passes year after year without ever tasting 

 a cherry, much less enjoying them in abundance. 



This ought not to be so ; and from among the crowd who are making, 

 and about to make, their fortunes out of grape, pear, or strawberry grow- 

 ing, let us hope to draw the attention of some to the fact that the people 

 love cherries, the people will buy cherries, the people will pay good re- 

 munerative prices for cherries. Cherries are good to eat fresh from the 

 tree, good to can, and as good or better than Zante currants when dried ; 

 and there is money — which is the grand point — in growing cherries for 

 market-purposes. 



In years gone by, when fruit had to be transported twenty or more miles 

 by wagons, and canning was unknown, there was often much reason for 

 the fruit-grower confining himself to such varieties mainly as were not im- 

 mediately perishable, and that would bear the rough transportation of that 

 day to market ; but now, when railroads cross our country like the threads 

 of a spider's web, the man with land at one hundred miles from the con- 

 suming market can grow cherries as profitably as he who resides at a 

 distance of only five to seven miles. 



I have said the trees can be easily grown from seed. It is only requisite 

 to gather them when ripe, and keep them until the next spring, never 

 letting them get dry, and planting as soon as the frost is out of the ground, 

 covering about as deep as for Indian corn. 



A friend of mine pursues a ready way of supplying his wants from year 

 to year as follows : About the time the trees are in flower, he starts on a 

 rainy morning, with trowel, dibble, and basket, to some tree of a well-known 

 good kind, underneath which he finds from one to fifty young natural seed- 



