ORANGE CULTURE IN CALIFORNIA. 103 



cessful orange culture; and when I say "orange culture," I 

 wish to be understood as including "lemon culture" also. We 

 are aware that the area is, indeed, limited, it being not more 

 than a ten-thousandth part of the arable land of the State, and 

 it may not be more than a fifty-thousandth part. Only a small 

 portion of this limited area will produce the best specimens of 

 citrus fruits. This is now known to be true in Southern Cali- 

 fornia. The culture is as yet in its experimental stage in the 

 central and northern parts of the State ; but only small por- 

 tions of those parts can produce the fruit successfully. There 

 is no chance for the oranges produced in one section of the 

 State to come into competition with those of another section. 

 First, because there is a demand for all that can be produced ; 

 and, second, because they ripen several weeks earlier in the 

 central and northern portions of the State than in the southern. 



Dr. J. R. Crandall, a distinguished pomologist of Auburn, 

 Placer county, is reported by the San Francisco Call as saying 

 there can never be any rivalry between Los Angeles county and 

 the northern counties in which semi-tropical fruit is grown, be- 

 cause the oranges of the latter counties mature six weeks earlier 

 than those of the former, and are out of the market before the 

 Los Angeles fruit comes in. 



In Ohio and other States contiguous thereto they have been 

 planting uninterruptedly, for scores of years, orchards of fruits 

 adapted to their climate ; yet the demand there for nursery 

 stock increases annually. The inference is that the orchards 

 must pay; that orchardists must be able to dispose of their 

 fruits to advantage, or the markets would be filled to repletion 

 and would be glutted, and that the planting of new orchards on 

 a large scale would cease. Nearly all the States of the Union 

 compete with one another in a greater or less degree in pro- 

 ducing these varieties of fruits. Notwithstanding all this, the 

 demand for temperate-climate fruits continues unabated. On 

 the other hand, the area of the United States adapted to orange 

 culture is almost nothing in comparison with the area adapted 

 to other fruit culture, and the danger of overproduction of citrus 

 fruits becomes a mere phantom, having an existence only in the 

 minds of the more timid of our inhabitants. 



