PICKING FRUIT 125 



in not pulling the spur off to which the stem is 

 attached, says T. A. Farrand, in a special report to 

 the American Pomological So- 

 ciety. Throw all inferior, 

 bruised or decayed fruits on 

 the ground rather than in the 

 basket, and thus avoid a mussy 

 lot of fruit for the packers to 

 cull over. Have good ladders 

 and pick all the fruit you can 

 from thence, rather than climb 

 around in the tree and break 

 the limbs and fruit spurs. FOR HIGH TREES 

 Two pickings, with an interval between, are 

 usually all that are necessary to clean up the tree. 

 One of the most successful Michigan growers, Mr. 

 Benton Gebhart, harvests all his cherries, both sweet 

 and sour, by spreading sheets under the trees ; the 

 pickers then clip the fruit off with scissors, leaving 

 about a half-inch stem with the fruit, allowing it to 

 drop on the sheets. Mr. Gebhart is far better satis- 

 fied with this method than with the usual way, as 

 there are no fruit spurs pulled off as in picking. The 

 pickers are well satisfied to do the work in this way. 

 The fruit is sorted from the sheets into the market 

 packages, and Mr. Gebhart claims that he gets on an 

 average seventy-five cents more for a sixteen-quart 

 crate of cherries with clipped stems than for undipped. 

 It takes from two, to two and a half, quarts more of 

 clipped stem fruit to fill a sixteen-quart crate, than 

 where the whole stem is left on. Cherries (particularly 

 the sweet varieties, which are very subject to rot) 



