HANDLING AND SHIPPING FRESH CHERRIES AND PRUNES. 5 



purposes enumerated or for fresh-fruit shipment, the cherries are 

 picked into pails, or buckets, of various sizes and types. Five- 

 pound pails and 10-pound buckets are the most common, some of the 

 buckets now in use having canvas bottoms as an added protection to 

 the fruit, both in picking into the pail and in emptying into the 

 field box. The pickers are paid by the pound, and as most of the 

 fruit goes to the canneries or is intended for maraschino firms, not 

 any too much care is exercised in picking. The cherries are grasped 

 by the pedicel, and in the course of picking considerable bruising 

 results from the holding of several in the hand before placing them 

 in the pail or box. The fruit is emptied from the picking pail into 

 boxes holding approximately 50 pounds and in these is hauled to the 

 cannery or packing house. 



Fruit for shipment is ordinarily packed in the standard 10-pound 

 cherry box with two compartments, each about 10 inches square and 

 2-| inches deep. The box is first faced with two layers of cherries 

 diagrammatically arranged according to the size of the fruit, the rest 

 being simply filled in. In putting in the facing layers, the fruit must 

 be packed very firmly and tightly. The facing operation often re- 

 sults in breaking the internal structure of the cherry and in much 

 bruising, which later develops into serious decay. Up to the present 

 time this territory has seldom had enough fresh cherries in good 

 condition to warrant car-lot shipments, and for that reason most of 

 the fruit is sent out in small lots to the near-by cities, to points in 

 California, and to markets occasionally as far east as Denver. The 

 pony refrigerator is not used to any extent, and nearly all the fruit 

 is shipped without refrigeration. 



t 



CAREFUL-HANDLING EXPERIMENTS. 



The careful-handling experiments with cherries were carried on 

 during the season of 1911. Table I and figure 1 give the average 

 results of these experiments for that season. A study of these data 

 emphasizes very strongly the relationship of handling to the condi- 

 tion of cherries in transit and on the market. 



The decay figures, as given in Table I, are a total of all decay, ex- 

 clusive of brown-rot, although it was quite impracticable in all cases 

 to separate with absolute accuracy this trouble from other forms of 

 decay. At the end of five days in the iced car, the carefully handled 

 fruit showed only 0.5 per cent of decay, while the comparable com- 

 mercially handled fruit showed 2.8 per cent of decay, practically 

 six times the decay found in the comparable carefully handled lots. 

 The results are equally striking at the end of transit periods of 10 

 and 15 days, the carefully handled fruit having 1.5 per cent of decay 

 at the end of 10 days and 4.3 per cent of decay at the end of 15 days> 



