492 JOUENAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



directions than others; inclination and business instinct, we think, will 

 keep him to those lines, and anything in the nature of experiment will 

 be wisely relegated to the future, when success warrants it. 



Too many lines of cultures are to be avoided: to grow only one 

 kind of fruit is to specialize, and to take the risks of specializing. 

 A good plan is to grow such fruits as can be gathered and marketed in 

 succession, the handling of two crops of an entirely different nature 

 being at the same time avoided. By so doing the labour question is 

 greatly simplified — the same body of casual labourers, pickers and 

 packers, a body of a given number, being engaged at the commencement 

 of the fruit season and carried through with it. Fluctuation in demand 

 for labour causes fluctuation in supply and inferiority in quahty; 

 the prospect of steady work entices a steady and reliable type of 

 worker. If the growing of small fruits — strawberries, raspberries, 

 gooseberries, currants — ^is contemplated on any extended scale, the 

 question of available labour for gathering must be carefully studied, and 

 these fruits should not be grown on a big scale at all unless that 

 question be settled. For limited areas of small fruits the neighbour- 

 ing towns and villages can usually be relied upon to supply sufficient 

 labour, and the inconvenience of obtaining pickers from a distance and 

 finding living accommodation for them is avoided. In established 

 fruit districts these matters arrange themselves ; it is the isolated fruit- 

 farmer who must be careful. 



The matter of ' ' kinds ' ' settled, another of even greater importance 

 promptly • presents itself — the matter of variety. Of all the factors 

 in successful fruit-farming probably no other is more potent than 

 the selection of the " varieties " to be planted. You may go to all 

 the pains and expense of growing a given fruit and growing it to 

 perfection to find in the end that it is either worthless, or only worth, 

 as a marketable commodity, half what another fruit of the same kind 

 but of another variety would be. And all the pains and expense of 

 cultivating the wTong variety are the same as those in the case of the 

 right variety. The right varieties, be they of apple, pear, plum, rasp- 

 berry, strawberry, or any other hardy fruits, are those which the 

 markets want, and the commercial fruit-grower must study and bow 

 to that demand. Generally speaking, the market asks for what really 

 are the best varieties. From the commercial point of view there are 

 far too many varieties of most kinds of fruits in existence, and the 

 narrowing down of them is much to be desired. The commercial 

 fruit-farmer, then, must be careful to stock his farm with the best 

 marketable varieties. As to what are the best, even experts disagree, 

 but only within the limit of saying one is better than the other when 

 both are good. To plant all that are good would be in most cases to 

 plant too many " varieties " of a given kind, a thing to be carefully 

 avoided; but a studied selection can be made from the acknowledged 

 good ones, and the indifferent and worthless varieties eschewed. 



The species and ** varieties " decided upon, the next consideration 

 is to procure the stock; and how very crucial is the matter of stock- 



