68 
FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
my neighbors, a member of the citrus 
exchange. 
LONG STEMS. 
There is no necessity for my enlarging 
upon the subject of long stems. I men¬ 
tioned long stems in the presence of Mr. 
Hart, and he looked perfectly shocked at 
the idea of anybody’s mentioning long 
stems. 
While we were out in California, M. 
Ramsey gave us a lecture at one of the 
most beautiful hotels in California, in 
which he spoke of the long stems as 
“murderers,” and that is a pretty good 
name for them. They never cease to do 
their bad work until they are delivered to 
the market. Almost every orange they 
touch has to suffer. I think the Hart 
clipper is just as good as the Kyle clip¬ 
per cutting short stems and not injuring 
the fruit on the opposite side from where 
you put the clippers. I don’t know of any 
other clippers that I would call so satisfac¬ 
tory. I think those good points are con¬ 
fined to those two. 
PICKING BOXES. 
Another thing I have had in mind, is 
to speak of the picking boxes. They are 
usually altogether too large. I think the 
picking box should not hold over half 
what the one in general use at the present 
time, holds. The fruit could be so much 
easier and I think much cheaper, han¬ 
dled. Now, it takes two men to handle 
one of them, but if we had a box half the 
size, one man could pretty generally do 
the same amount of work that it now 
.takes two. 
WASHING. 
When the fruit comes to the packing 
house, in most localities of the State we 
have to prepare to have it washed. I vis¬ 
ited Mr. Temple’s house when it was in 
operation and was very greatly impressed 
with the soaking tank. I watched Mr. 
Temple’s sales gradually getting better 
and better, and I decided to go up to Win¬ 
ter Park and see if I could find out the 
reason why. I went into his packing 
house. Maybe some of you know that we 
had a frost last winter. Of course, very 
few places in the State were affected by 
this frost, but still we had a frost. Some 
of us knew that we had some light fruit, 
and we did our best to eliminate it. We 
would instruct our men to cull out the 
light fruit, and they would judge of the 
weight of oranges until finally from fa¬ 
tigue they could not tell a heavy ; or¬ 
ange from a light one, and we would 
find a good orange with the bad and a bad 
one with the good. The men tried to help 
us out, but it is simply an impossibility 
not to make mistakes. But at Mr. Tem¬ 
ple’s place, he was able to cull every light 
orange out of his pack. When the or¬ 
anges were put up at market, the buy¬ 
ers knew that they are getting heavy 
fruit when they paid for heavy fruit. 
The light fruit were eliminated in the 
soaking tank. The process is very inter¬ 
esting. A man stands by the tank with a 
long ladle, and if an orange is floating a 
little too high, he spoons it right out. If 
an orange was floating, but a light touch 
with the ladle would send it down, and it 
came up slowly it was all right, but if 
it came up like a cork, it was ladeled out. 
