FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 
45 
WASHING AND DRYING. 
It is as yet absolutely necessary to 
wash fruit to give it the satisfactory ap¬ 
pearance to please the trade. 
During the early experience in wash¬ 
ing, it came to be believed that “washing” 
greatly increased the decay of fruit. With 
the careful packing and handling of fruit, 
and the great improvements in washing 
machinery, the supposed bad effects of 
washing have mostly disappeared. 
The best outfits for washing, now con¬ 
sist of a soaking tank filled with hot water, 
containing an alkaline cleansing powder, 
especially where the fruit is black from 
sooty mold from the whitefly. Gold 
Dust or other alkaline powders are now 
used in the water. 
THE PROPER DRYING OF FRUIT. 
The next and most important step, is 
the proper drying of the fruit before it 
is wrapped and put into the box. 
Two methods are employed for dry¬ 
ing, involving two diametrically opposed 
principles—the absorption of moisture on 
the fruit, by cold air, the other by hot air. 
Those using “cold air” seem to be pre¬ 
possessed by the “precooling idea” as 
practiced in California, where they go 
still further, by precooling the fruit in 
precooled rooms, and load into precooled 
cars, and the cars iced sufficiently to main¬ 
tain 37 to 40 degrees. 
Those trying to dry by cold air blast in 
Florida, seem to forget the immense dif¬ 
ference in climatic difference in the at¬ 
mosphere in California, which gives them 
only eleven to fourteen inches of rainfall, 
and that of Florida, which gives from 53 
to 56 inches of rainfall. They also forget 
that the California fruit travels to market 
over a dry, hot desert for over one thou¬ 
sand miles, where dryness is not a ques¬ 
tion, but where heat becomes their 
greatest foe, and naturally, and in con¬ 
sonance with the law of physics, suggests 
cold. 
They whoi try to dry by the cold blast, 
also utterly forget the natural law of phy¬ 
sics—that cold tends to precipitate moist¬ 
ure —that when the “dew point'* is 
reached, water actually deposits on all ob¬ 
jects down to the dew point temperature. 
Two marked practical demonstrations 
of this point have come in my experience. 
Several years ago*, my wife in my ab¬ 
sence, had about one hundred boxes of 
oranges packed on a clear cool day and 
left in the packing house. During the 
•night the weather changed to a warm, 
muggy atmosphere. When she went to 
the packing house in the morning to con¬ 
tinue packing, she found the paper and 
fruit throughout the 'packed boxes, as 
wet as though it had been given a Rus¬ 
sian steam bath. It was put out in the 
sun, and dried as well as such could, and 
shipped to Baltimore. The returns were 
—“Received in very bad order”—for 
which $1.00 per box was taken from the 
market price. This is a strong physical, 
as well as financial demonstration of pre¬ 
cooled fruit attracting moisture in Florida. 
Another demonstration was observed 
the 29th of December last. The previous 
day and night had been clear, cold and 
dry. In the morning it warmed up rapid¬ 
ly, and although the day was bright and 
clear, every casing and piece of wood¬ 
work inside the house was covered with 
