GRADING, PACKING, AND MARKETING FRUIT. 



183 



packing ; but no amount of care will make bad fruit good. There 

 is plenty of rubbish sent up to the market at present which only 

 spoils the sample, and is never fit for human food. If these 

 remarks of mine are taken any notice of, I am sure the fruit- 

 grower will reap a benefit, and the salesman will have a business 

 in which he could take an interest and pleasure, instead of, as at 

 present, dreading the time the outdoor fruit commences ; and 

 last, not least, we should keep many hundreds of thousands of 

 pounds in this country which now go to the foreigner. 



At the conclusion of his paper Mr. Monro read the following 

 letter, which he said he had just received from the- manager of 

 one of the finest retail fruit businesses in London : — 



" The arguments now so popular on the question of British- 

 grown fruit can hardly be said to be fairly contested without the 

 opinions of the retailers, and at the Royal Horticultural Society's 

 show you may have an opportunity of putting before the growers 

 some of the difficulties we retailers have to contend with in the 

 purchasing of home-grown fruit. There are two essentials our 

 own growers have overlooked, the absence of which compels us 

 to depend much on the foreign markets for our supply. It can 

 never be doubted by those who have had much to do with the 

 foreign (especially the French) packers that they are far in 

 advance of our own people in this necessary art. There is so 

 wide a difference between the packing and sorting of our own 

 growers and that of foreigners, that English outdoor fruit in the 

 high-class trade has actually become a by-word. I will give you 

 an instance of a practical change having been made in this direc- 

 tion. Until recently one of our large growers of Apples, who 

 could always in a fair season send to market large, handsome, 

 well-coloured fruit, put it into the ordinary bushel baskets, heap- 

 ing measure. The consequence was (and a common error too) 

 that this fine fruit when ripe for use showed cuts and bruises 

 unsightly for table use, thus disfiguring and destroying the beau- 

 tiful appearance of fruit which otherwise would have commanded 

 a far higher marketable price. This man has learnt his lesson, 

 and now adopts the plan of sorting and carefully packing into 

 the same baskets, but not with more than three layers or so of 

 the best fruit, according to their respective sizes, thus securing a 

 better profit to himself, and to the retailer as well. I know 



