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until we get ready to pack them into small boxes. Let the fruit get 

 thoroughly dry, as dry as a chip if you have a mind to, and when you 

 get ready to do the boxing dip it into boiling water. If you want to doctor 

 it any you can do it, but when you simply dip it into boiling water you 

 have got the pure fruit left without any doctoring; that is to destroy the 

 eggs of the insect that makes the worm in dried fruit, and if there is any 

 insect that will kill them. We use a wire basket made of coarse wire, with 

 meshes small enough so that the dried fruit will not run out, and that, when 

 you dip the basket into the boiling kettle, allows the water to pass through 

 freely. Sink the basket into the boiling water, merely let it stay long 

 enough for the water to permeate all through the basket, raise it out, dip it 

 down again, and let it stay in about the same time; raise it out and let the 

 water drip out, and lay the fruit in a pile on a table or a clean floor. We 

 dip in that way what we think we can box during the next day. We throw 

 in a pile that way in order to let the whole mass become damp or dry alike. 

 In a single bucketful some of the pieces may be pretty wet and others dry; 

 we throw it in a mass, and the dry pieces will take the moisture from the 

 damp ones, and the whole pile becomes equally damp. Let it stay there 

 until it gets pretty dry, so dry that there is no danger of its moulding after 

 it is pressed into the box; and when we go to boxing we have a very fine 

 oiled paper, and line the boxes with that; then we take some of the best 

 specimens of fruit and spread them out with the fingers, and place them 

 on a layer in the bottom of the box; in that lies paper that is put in the 

 bottom of the box first; then we face the box with the fruit, and fill up the 

 box, set it on the scales and weigh exactly twenty-five pounds of fruit into 

 the box; take it out and put it under a press, a screw press or a lever press — 

 we have a lever press in our neighborhood, it is patented in Oregon, which 

 is much more speedy than a screw press and does the work equally well; it is 

 not made quite stout enough, and we often have to take it to the blacksmith 

 shop and have stronger pieces put on top where the lever works; with the 

 exception of that it works very well, and is very speedy. When the press 

 is put on the fruit and it is packed into the box enough to put the lid on, 

 we slip it out and nail the lid on and turn the box, and when it is opened 

 to the market this faced box is shown, the same way as in packing cherries. 

 Sometimes we put it into fifty-pound boxes instead of twenty-five. 



A Delegate: When you put green fruit on trays do you turn it? 



Mr. Smith: We put it on trays with the cup side up and dry it — no need 

 of turning it. That is the way we dry our apricots and peaches. We dry 

 no apples or pears; we dry plums and prunes. In cutting peaches there 

 are a great many clingstone peaches raised in Vaca Valley, and we got so 

 in the last year or two that we prefer those to the freestone peach for dry- 

 ing, and we have a knife that we can cut clingstone peaches as fast as we 

 can freestone. A great many men prefer to pit clingstone peaches to free- 

 stone; ladies do not because it is pretty hard work on the wrist, and ladies 

 and girls are hardly strong enough, but I have seen men who could pit 

 more clingstone peaches than freestone. 



Mr. Butler: What is the knife? 



Mr. Smith: It is a knife made in the shape of a common shoe knife with 

 a little bent blade on the point of it like that, and two little springs; they 

 are made sharp — and any knife must be kept sharp. They are made of 

 spring steel so that you can open them or close them up to fit the size of 

 the pit of the peach or apricot; you fit them right into the stem end and 

 turn the knife one way and the peach the other and it will come right 

 around as smooth and nice, so that a man that has the hang of it will take 

 a pit out as nice as a freestone peach. We have used also what they call 



