1 88 HOW TO LIVE IN THE COUNTRY 



This handling of apples applies to every other 

 fruit do it with refinement. The trouble with the 

 pears and the peaches that rot in transit is very 

 largely that they are tumbled about and rolled. They 

 are poured from the picking bag or basket into the 

 transit basket Pickers are not careful and dealers 

 are even less so. Nothing deserves your most care- 

 ful handling more than these delicious gifts of 

 Nature. Do not pull the fruit from the tree, but 

 clip the stem. Do not lay them in piles on the 

 ground, but ripen them in cool, dark places. Pears 

 should* be picked, as a rule, five or ten days before 

 becoming soft and stored in dark rooms, or shipped 

 at once. 



Winter pears can be kept precisely like winter 

 apples in bins. The Grand Duke plum also can be 

 kept in cellars until midwinter. The storage of 

 grapes depends upon so many conditions that I should 

 not advise any effort at cellar storage. Keep them 

 in dry rooms, spread thinly in baskets and covered 

 with brown paper. 



In Florida my orchard is something very different, 

 but very delightful. Of course the orange stands 

 first and is a close rival for the apples. In blossom, 

 beginning in February, its fragrance rolls in waves 

 with the wind for half a mile. Mingled with the 

 odor of the pines, nothing can be more wholesome. 

 Imagine three hundred full-grown orange trees, 

 standing about twenty feet high, absolutely white with 

 bloom, stormed by millions of bees, yet many sorts 



