FLORIDA .STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
53 
fruit that has been carefully handled and 
is not cut or bruised. 
Mr. Stubenrauch: That takes you 
right back to careful handling. You get 
a machine that is all right with a careful 
man to run it, and you may get the fruit 
washed without injury, provided care 
has been taken with it all along the line, 
but if you have a lot of injured fruit 
coming in from the grove and put it 
through the washers, you will give it ten 
chances to one to be made more sub¬ 
ject to decay. 
Mr. Hart: Now, take the matter of 
clipper cutting or long stems. Don’t 
you find a marked difference between dif¬ 
ferent varieties of oranges in regard to 
that? Take the pineapple orange; there 
is no need of anyone clipper cutting a 
pineapple orange or of getting long stems. 
In California, I noticed that the stem 
of the orange is in more of a pit; the.or¬ 
ange is rough around the calyx and is 
very subject to clipper cutting, making it 
much more difficult to clip the stems 
close; therefore they do double clipping. 
The more careful growers and shippers 
have their fruit clipped twice. It seems 
to me that would be entirely useless with 
the Florida orange, as grown in most por¬ 
tions of the State. 
A great many have told me it was im¬ 
possible to get their fruit clipped prop¬ 
erly. I work twelve to fifteen hands, but 
it isn’t very often I have to* discharge a 
man because he does not do his work 
right. I sometimes find good workers 
who are mentally weak and in two in¬ 
stances I decided that it was impossible 
to teach them, to do good picking, but as 
a general thing I have no difficulty in 
training men so that there will not be 
more than one or two per cent, of long 
stem oranges. 
When these go into the washer, every 
one of them is examined. Either the eye 
or the thumb or the finger gets into* the 
calyx and if the stem is long it goes into 
a box to be gone over and clipped before 
being washed. 
I think it is safe to say that if the fruit 
is picked properly and washed properly 
with a Warner washer, it does not do 
it any injury to be washed. I have tested 
it repeatedly in the years gone by, wash¬ 
ing some and leaving some unwashed, 
and putting the twO' side by side, and in 
every instance so far, the washed fruit 
has stood up the best. 
I am afraid of brush washers. They 
may be all right, but I am afraid of them. 
I am not advertising the Warner washer, 
but I have tested that more thoroughly 
than any other and I believe it is abso¬ 
lutely safe if properly handled, but it is 
not properly handled in many cases. 
Either the operators do not gauge the 
fruit so that there is the proper holding 
back or resistance to its going through, 
or it is overloaded; some rivet head or 
other roughness inside the cylinder is not 
looked after and done away with, long 
stems are overlooked or too little water 
is used. The principle is simply a lift¬ 
ing up and rolling* down of both sponges 
and fruit, and with right conditions no 
harm can result. 
I believe a great deal of the injury in 
the washers is in the improper handling of 
the washers themselves. 
Mr. Stubenrauch: I do not doubt 
that you are right. I can cite an exam¬ 
ple that came under my own notice. Out 
in California we were able to compare 
