HANDLING AND SHIPPING FKESH CHERRIES AND PRUNES. 5 
purposes enumerated or for fresh-fruit shipment, the cherries are 
picked into pails, or buckets, of various sizes and types. Five- 
pound pails and 10-pound buckets are the most common, some of the 
buckets now in use having canvas bottoms as an added protection to 
the fruit, both in picking into the pail and in emptying into the 
field box. The pickers are paid by the pound, and as most of the 
fruit goes to the canneries or is intended for maraschino firms, not 
any too much care is exercised in picking. The cherries are grasped 
by the pedicel, and in the course of picking considerable bruising 
results from the holding of several in the hand before placing them 
in the pail or box. The fruit is emptied from the picking pail into 
boxes holding approximately 50 pounds and in these is hauled to the 
cannery or packing house. 
Fruit for shipment is ordinarily packed in the standard 10-pound 
cherry box with two compartments, each about 10 inches square and 
2J inches deep. The box is first faced with two layers of cherries 
diagrammatically arranged according to the size of the fruit, the rest 
being simply filled in. In putting in the facing layers, the fruit must 
be packed very firmly and tightly. The facing operation often re- 
sults in breaking the internal structure of the cherry and in much 
bruising, which later develops into serious decay. Up to the present 
time this territory has seldom had enough fresh cherries in good 
condition to warrant car-lot shipments, and for that reason most of 
the fruit is sent out in small lots to the near-by cities, to points in 
California, and to markets occasionally as far east as Denver. The 
pony refrigerator is not used to any extent, and nearly all the fruit 
is shipped without refrigeration. 
CAREFUL-HANDLING EXPERIMENTS. 
The careful-handling experiments with cherries were carried on 
during the season of 1911. Table I and figure 1 give the average 
results of these experiments for that season. A study of these data 
emphasizes very strongly the relationship of handling to the condi- 
tion of cherries in transit and on the market. 
The decay figures, as given in Table I, are a total of all decay, ex- 
clusive of brown-rot, although it was quite impracticable in all cases 
to separate with absolute accuracy this trouble from other forms of 
decay. At the end of five days in the iced car, the carefully handled 
fruit showed only 0.5 per cent of decay, while the comparable com- 
mercially handled fruit showed 2.8 per cent of decay, practically 
six times the decay found in the comparable carefully handled lots. 
The results are equally striking at the end of transit periods of 10 
and 15 days, the carefully handled fruit having 1.5 per cent of decay 
at the end of 10 days and 4.3 per cent of decay at the end of 15 days> 
