532 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



who cultivate them, and for unheated greenhouses, particularly 

 those which do not get the sun, they will prove the most 

 satisfactory plants to cultivate, and will develop a wonderful 

 degree of beauty when so protected. 



AMERICAN FRUIT-EVAPORATORS AND EVAPORATING. 

 By Mr. Edward W. Badger, F.R.H.S. 

 [Read August 12, 1890.] 



Most growers of hardy fruits in this country have found that 

 the years in which the most plentiful crops are produced are not 

 usually the most profitable years. The glut of fruit then sent 

 into our markets so lowers prices that the cost of gathering, 

 carriage, and marketing invariably leaves little or nothing for 

 the grower. One consequence is that much good fruit remains 

 ungathered, or is otherwise wasted, for want of some mode of 

 dealing with it that would preserve it, and enable growers to 

 select their own time for sending it to market, and thereby tend 

 to prevent prices going down to a profitless point, as they often 

 do under existing circumstances. 



American fruit-growers have suffered from the same cause, 

 much as we have done ; but more than twenty years ago they 

 applied themselves with characteristic energy to find out a way 

 of combating the difficulty, and it was not long before it was 

 discovered that there is a way of treating fruit, for which a 

 profitable sale cannot be found in a fresh state, which enables 

 the grower to convert every pound of it into money, and avoids 

 glutting the market with a perishable commodity. My purpose 

 this afternoon is to describe the American mode of procedure, 

 which is in use in all the fruit-growing States so successfully 

 that it has caused an immense increase in fruit-growing, and 

 made it not only a very large, but a more reliable and profitable 

 industry than it was previously. It is a method applicable to 

 all sorts of hardy fruits — apples, pears, plums, cherries, apricots, 

 peaches, and even such soft kinds as raspberries and strawberries. 

 By its aid fruit can be cheaply preserved in a wholesome and 

 saleable condition for a year or more. The method is known in 

 America as 11 fruit-evaporating," and the apparatus by which 



