182 RESOURCES OF CALIFORNIA. 
and thus prepared, they will be superior to any of the Euro- 
pean hops. 
The Chinese sugar-cane grows luxuriantly in this state, but 
it is not extensively cultivated. 
Flax, hemp, and the basket-willow, are not cultivated, or in 
patches so small as to be unworthy of notice. 
§ 143. Kitchen Vegetables.—The vegetables for the kitchen 
—such as cabbage, cauliflower, beets, parsnips, carrots, rad- 
ishes, onions, melons, squashes, pumpkins, green peas, string- 
beans, tomatoes, asparagus, rhubarb, okra, cucumbers, lettuce, 
garden-egg, and so forth—thrive in California, many of them 
beyond example elsewhere. Cabbages weighing fifteen pounds 
are wonders in the New York market; in San Francisco they 
are common. Whole fields of cabbage-heads, weighing twenty 
pounds each, have been grown; and hard, solid heads, with no 
loose leaves, weighing forty-five and fifty-three pounds each, 
are on record. One cabbage, which did not make a head, 
grew to be seven feet wide, throwing out leaves three and a 
half feet long on each side. In many cases the cabbage has 
been converted into a perennial, evergreen, tree-like plant, by 
preventing it from going to seed. Several of these are now 
growing in the state, with stalks from two to six feet high, 
and a foliage that grows through winter and summer. 
The largest squash or soft-skin pumpkin produced in Cali- 
fornia weighed two hundred and sixty pounds, and the vine 
which bore it had several others weighing over one hundred 
pounds each; the total weight of its fruit being more than 
eight hundred pounds! Elsewhere, sixty pounds is a very large 
pumpkin or squash; and there is scarcely a record in the At- 
lantic states of a greater weight than one hundred pounds, 
which has been frequently surpassed here. In 1857, one 
squash-vine on the ranch of James Simmons, in Yuba county, 
produced one hundred and thirty squashes, weighing in all 
twenty-six hundred and four pounds! In the same year, J. Q. 
A. Ballou, at San José, grew two squashes, weighing two hun- 
lred and ten and two hundred and four pounds respectively. 
