JULY. 
199 
THE FRUIT CROP OP 1861. 
-The season being now so far advanced as to enable us to speak with 
accuracy as to the state of the fruit-crop, I beg to offer a few remarks 
on the subject. Its importance cannot be over-rated. When we con¬ 
sider the daily increasing demand for fruit which the daily increasing 
populations of all our great towns create, its importance is clearly 
manifest; and moreover, when we consider the facilities which railways 
and steamships, now-a-days, offer continental growers of sending their 
produce to all our great markets, enabling them, with their more 
favourable climate and cheap labour, to sell at prices highly injurious 
to home growers, it becomes a necessity with the latter to make every 
endeavour to meet a competition so destructive to their interests. As 
there must be a cause for everything, so, when there is a deficient fruit- 
crop, the cause generally assigned is the cold unfavourable weather of 
pur springs. That cold, frosty, unfavourable weather in spring is 
highly injurious to fruit-crops, no one, who knows anything of fruit- 
tree cultivation, will deny. I, however, notwithstanding this drawback, 
believe it is quite possible to get good crops of fruit in nine seasons out 
of ten. Extraordinary and exceptionable seasons, like the last, which 
baffle the skill of the best cultivators, will occasionally occur, but when 
they do come we should take them as salutary stimulants to renewed 
exertion. With these few prefatory remarks, I now proceed to the 
subject more immediately before me—The Fruit Crop of 1861. 
The fruit crop in this part of the country is, with the exception of 
Cherries, bush fruit, and Strawberries, very light. What, then, let us 
ask, is the cause ? Has a mild winter and a cold precarious spring 
done the mischief? Decidedly not: for surely the last winter was suf¬ 
ficiently seasonable and cold to satisfy those who say the seasons have 
completely changed since their juvenile days—that now our winters are 
much milder than they were in former times, and our springs 
much milder, and hence the failure of our fruit crops. With the 
exception of two slight frosts early in May, I never remember a 
spring more favourable for fruit-trees than the past; therefore, the 
deficient crop this year cannot be attributed to the mildness of the past 
winter, nor to the precarious weather of the past spring. What, then, 
has been the cause of the deficient crop ? Owing to the last most extra¬ 
ordinary season, the want of bright solar light for so many months last 
year and the great fall of rain, the young wood and buds were un¬ 
ripened and imperfect, and hence the cause of our deficient fruit crops 
this year. Even our glass structures have suffered from want of light 
last season; hard-wooded greenhouse plants are not in general flowering 
so profusely as usual. Vines in late houses, where little or no artificial 
heat has been used, have not “ shown” fruit so abundantly as usual, 
nor are the bunches as compact and full as usual. Peaches, Nectarines, 
and Pears in orchard-houses, where no artificial heat has been used, 
are also very deficient. 
And now as to the state of out-door crops. Bush-fruit—Raspberries, 
Gooseberries, and Currants—are abundant crops. Raspberry canes 
