FRUIT HARVESTING OPERATIONS 
On 
ripen much better in the dark in storage than they do 
on the trees. Many varieties of pears are ruined by 
being allowed to remain on the trees too long. They 
often develop a coarse grain and are full of hard, gritty 
spicules which give a consumer the impression that he 
is eating sand. Frequently ‘‘water core’’ appears, and 
the fruit rapidly deteriorates. When ripened in stor- 
age in the dark, these spicules or grit do not develop 
so much and the fruit keeps much longer. 
Cherries are best picked when they are about in the 
condition to be eaten. If they have to be shipped a long 
distance they are sometimes picked a little green and, 
like peaches and apricots, often reach the market in 
very poor condition. In the famous cherry belt of the 
Pacific Coast, we often find the growers going through 
their orchards and picking off a cherry here and a 
cherry there over hundreds of trees to make up a five 
or ten-pound package to ship East, and while fruit 
growers in the Eastern and Northern states are still 
shoveling snow, these first cherries arrive on the markets 
in the big cities. Some of them have sold as high as 
$100 for the first ten pounds. These are largely matters 
of advertising as such fruit is not usually in very good 
condition to eat. 
Such fruits as olives, oranges and lemons are picked at 
several different stages, according to the use to which 
they are going to be put. Lemons are almost always 
picked according to size and the stem is cut off with the 
shears. The first of the olives for pickling are care- 
fully removed by hand; after that the olives that go 
into oil are shaken from the tree and gathered from the 
ecround. Such fruit as figs is allowed to drop naturally 
