HANDLING GARDEN-CROPS FOR PROFIT. 



48 



care is taken to have all fruit carefully handled and 

 sorted, and only the best is shipped. For later sales we 

 have chiefly the Wealthy and Fameuse for early winter, 

 though Shiawassee is taking the place of Fameuse. A 

 superior late fall apple is Switzer. Our long-keepers are 

 Scott Winter and Bethel. The excess of our tree-fruits 

 over local demand goes either to lower New England or 

 Montreal. Packages for apples must be neat and clean. 

 For less than a barrel, half-bushel gift-baskets suit our 

 trade best. We have now about 12 

 acres devoted to tree-fruits. 



With pears, plums and cherries we 

 had had nothing but failure until 

 we received the new Russians about 

 ten years ago. The earlier plantings 

 of these are now coming into full 

 bearing, and promise very successful 

 results. The Bessemianka pear suits 

 us very well as a medium-sized fall 

 fruit ; but I am looking now for some- 

 thing even better in the Polish pear, 

 Ludovka, which I received nine years 

 ago from the lamented Charles Gibb, 

 of Canada, who went with Prof. 

 Budd to Russia. It seems to be an 

 ironclad Flemish Beauty. It is yet 

 too soon to speak with much exact- 

 ness of these lately imported tree- 

 fruits of northern Europe, though 

 they are much hardier than any be- 

 fore known. — T. H. Hoskins, ]'t. 



PROF. W. F. MASSEY ON PACKING FRUITS 

 AND VEGETABLES. 



One of the most difficult things to 

 get a beginner in packing fruits and 

 vegetables to understand is the neces- 

 sity for filling packages tightly, so as 

 to prevent jostling in transit. In the 

 north the apple-growers understand 

 this well, but from our superb apple- 

 country of western North Carolina, 

 where the finest apples in the world 

 can be grown, the growers bring their 

 fine apples to Raleigh in such bad 

 order that they do not command half 

 the price of well-culled and packed 

 northern fruit of really more inferior 

 quality. In a series of Farmers' 

 Institutes, held in the mountain 

 country, I tried hard to impress upon Part of 



the farmers the necessity for tight 

 packing, but it was hard to make 



them believe that the fruit would not be mashed by the 

 process. They seem to think that apples are apples, and 

 so they dump large ones and small ones, yellow ones and 

 red ones indiscriminately, into all sorts of packages, and 

 so loosely that they are jostled over and over each other 

 and arrive here with cider running out of the package: 



years in all the farm papers, is the necessity for honest 

 packing of fruit and vegetables. Growers seem to sup- 

 pose that city buyers and dealers look only at the big 

 specimens put on top, when in fact, the only one de- 

 ceived in the transaction is the shipper, who always 

 loses in cash and reputation. Years ago I grew 

 tomatoes largely for shipping north. My neighbors, 

 who witnessed my packing, ridiculed me for throwing to 

 the hogs so many bushels of cracked and distorted speci- 



Another matter which has been insisted upon for many 



Old Fence-Row, Showing Plum Trees badly infested with 

 Black-knot. (See page 478.) (From a photograph.) 



mens, and told me that I was throwing away all my 

 profit. One particularly rainy season, when I had a crop 

 of 30 acres of early tomatoes, and the splitting was es- 

 pecially bad, it took a great deal of nerve to throw the 

 imperfect ones all out, but I did it and the result was that 

 my crop started in at $3.50 a crate, while my neighbors 

 got $1 or less. As the season advanced and good toma- 



