36 FRUIT RANCHING. 



was the Okanagan district which liad done most to 

 make British Columbia so widely and famously 

 known as a producer of excellent fruit, and I wanted 

 to see what the country was like. As it chanced, the 

 opportunity presented itself to visit the valley in the 

 company of the President and Secretary of the British 

 Columbia Fruit Growers' Association. I seized it, 

 and was thus enabled not only to see the Okanagan 

 country under the best auspices, but also to gain 

 access to localities which might possibly have been 

 denied to a simple stranger unprovided with special 

 credentials. Moreover, the two officials mentioned 

 were to give a series of demonstrations in tree- 

 planting, pruning, and spraying, and to advocate the 

 formation of a Central Provincial Exchange as an 

 agency for co-operative buying and selling — chiefly 

 for selling. 



The first locality at which we stopped was 

 Kelowna, a bright little town, with an air of English 

 neatness and prosperity, the well-built houses stand- 

 ing back in large gardens, and the streets being wide, 

 while behind the town was a large expanse of farm 

 land, intersected by fenced roads. We were driven 

 on to a large fruit farm of some three hundred acres. 

 But the trees were quite young, and had by no means 

 reached the bearing stage. All the fruit land in that 

 district was dependent upon irrigation; and some- 

 how, although I was posted up in the advantages of 

 irrigation as regards both the certainty of an annual 

 crop and the heaviness of the yield, I had a prejudice 

 in favour of unirrigated land. Nor did I see any- 

 thing either at Kelowna, or at Summerland or Ver- 

 non, both of which places we visited during the course 



