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Mr. W. W. Smith, of Vacaville: With your permission, Mr. President, 

 and that of the convention, I will give you our process at Vacaville for 

 drying fruit, and I will give the process of drying apricots, as that is the 

 first fruit we began to dry on; and the rule in regard to drying apricots will 

 hold good in drying all of our other fruits, unless it would be in making 

 raisins or drying grapes; in that, I fancy a little different way of proceed- 

 ing would be necessary. In the first place, I want to say that it is utterly 

 impossible to make a good article of dried fruit out of a poor article of green 

 fruit. Your ladies might just as well undertake to make a silk dress out 

 of a bolt of calico as to make good dried fruit out of poor, immature fruit. 

 We let our fruit get thoroughly ripe, in the very best eating order, just as 

 you would like to go and pluck an apricot from the tree and eat it right 

 there ; too ripe to ship. You cannot make good dried out of green or imma- 

 ture fruit; bear that in mind. Let your fruit stay on the trees until it is 

 thoroughly ripe; pick carefully; don't shake it oft on the ground, as the 

 gentleman says the Chinamen do, but pick it from the tree carefully in 

 baskets and haul it to your cutting shed — not on a common stiff farm 

 wagon; if you do, you will have it badly bruised by the time you get to 

 the shed, and every bruised spot in the green fruit shows a dark spot in the 

 dried fruit. Haul it in a spring wagon. We cut the fruit and lay it on 

 trays, which are generally made of lumber two by three feet — you can get 

 them made at the box factory generally by taking a board or plank a foot 

 wide and an inch thick, cut it in two, and that makes two boards half an 

 inch thick and a foot wide; they are three feet long; they are cleated 

 together with two or three cleats, and a cleat around the outer edge. The 

 fruit is cut, laid on those trays, and immediately put in the sulphur box 

 and sulphured for about forty minutes — an hour is better for a good dried 

 article; I would advise sulphuring for one hour. There maybe and prob- 

 ably is an objection in the minds of a great many people to this thing of 

 sulphuring fruit — bleaching, as some call it. It does not bleach the fruit; 

 it simply closes the pores, and prevents the fruit from turning dark, and 

 stops it from coloring; the fruit is already bright when it is cut. The trays 

 are taken from the sulphur box, and in our locality, where I think we have 

 just such a climate as you have here — I think it gets just about as hot; we 

 are free from fogs and dews, as I understand you are here — the trays are 

 put right on the ground — sometimes we have an acre, sometimes two acres 

 of land covered with those trays — where we can get a hillside sloping about 

 35 or 40 degrees, the fruit dries quicker, and the quicker you can dry the 

 fruit the better it is. We dry our apricots in about three days from the 

 time they are cut and put out in the sun, and we take up the dried article 

 ready to box. When we box. them, we use boxes made of seasoned sugar 

 pine that hold twenty-five pounds; I think they are six inches deep, nine 

 inches wide, and fifteen inches long, inside measure. With a common 

 lever press or screw press, you can easily press twenty-five pounds of dried 

 peaches, apricots, or plums into that box. The lumber is dressed on both 

 sides, and we generally put them together with these thick wire nails; in 

 fact, the last year we used that nail altogether in making all of our fruit 

 boxes, because we find them to be the best; all things equal, they are the 

 cheapest in the long run, and look a little better than the cut nail. We 

 generally use threepennies for making peach, grape, and dried fruit boxes; 

 for nailing the lid, we use any nail which is stout enough; for making 

 crates, we use a smaller nail than that. After the fruit is dried and 

 taken from the trays the rule is among most of us to pour it out or 

 throw it into what we call shipping boxes, sixty-pound boxes that are 

 used for sending fruit to the cannery in; we let it stay in those boxes 



