296 UNIVERSITY OP CALIFORNIA EXPERIMENT STATION 



palatable and wholesome for a month or two after a freeze if properly 

 handled. Many growers immediately gathered and shipped large 

 quantities of such frozen oranges, but in many cases they arrived in 

 poor condition, and the market being suspicious and overstocked, 

 the returns were in most cases negligible. Indeed it may be stated 

 that in very few, if any cases did the returns justify such shipments, 

 and the loss to the growers as a whole through the injury of the 

 market was far greater than any benefit obtained. The shipment of 

 injured fruit was continued so long that much of it reached the con- 

 sumers in dried-out, inedible condition and served to render them 

 distrustful of the California product. The results from such ship- 

 ments following the 1913 freeze were such that it can be unhesitatingly 

 recommended that in the case of such severe freezes, no shipments of 

 fruit should be made following the freeze, until sufficient time has 

 elapsed to allow the separation of the good from the injured fruit. 



It was thought by some growers that oranges picked promptly 

 after the freeze and stored in cool places or placed in cold storage, 

 where they would not dry out too rapidly and fermentation would be 

 arrested, would remain in good condition for a much longer period 

 than otherwise. No trial was made of this method that could be called 

 complete and conclusive, although several experiments were made. In 

 two cases one of the writers made an examination of navels that had 

 been picked two or three days after the freeze and stored in a cool 

 place in the packinghouse (not in cold storage). This examination 

 was made in March over two months after the freeze, and the fruits 

 were compared with navels from the same groves that had remained 

 on the trees. In neither case could any marked difference be observed 

 between the stored and the unstored fruits. In both cases they had 

 dried out considerably, and the flavor had become flat and insipid. 



The Separation of Good Fruit from Frozen Fruit. In many 

 groves all over the state, only a portion of the fruit was so severely 

 frozen as to cause its drying out and decay. The good fruit in most 

 cases was mixed on the tree with the frozen fruit and could not be 

 separated from much of the frozen fruit by any external characters. 

 The making of a practical segregation of such fruit became an im- 

 portant problem following the 1913 freeze, as it had been also in many 

 lesser freezes. No method of separation based on the judgment of 

 external appearances proved successful. The difference in specific 

 gravity between frozen and sound fruit had been used as a means of 

 making a segregation. Finally, as a result of drying out sufficient 

 difference in specific gravity comes to exist between injured and unin- 

 jured fruits, so that a solution somewhat lighter than water, such 



