For making raisins they wait until the grape is fully ripe, and then carefully cut off the bunches and lay them either on a hard clay floor, formed in the open air, or on brown paper laid between the vine rows.  They do not trim out poor grapes from the bunches, because, as they assert, there are none; but I suspect this will have to be done for the very finest raisins, such as would tempt a reluctant buyer.  The bunches require from eighteen to twenty-four days of exposure in the sun to be cured.  During that time they are gently turned from time to time, and such as are earliest cured are at once removed to a raisin-house.

This is fitted with shelves, on which the raisins are laid about a foot thick, and here they are allowed to sweat a little.  If they sweat too much the sugar candies on the outside, and this deteriorates the quality of the raisin.  It is an object to keep the bloom on the berries.  They are kept in the raisin-house, I was told, five or six weeks, when they are dry enough to box.  It is as yet customary to put them in twenty-five pound boxes, but, no doubt, as more experience is gained, farmers will contrive other parcels.  Chinese do all the work in raisin-making, and are paid one dollar a day, they supplying themselves with food.  There is no rain during the raisin-making season, and, consequently, the whole outdoor work may be done securely as well as cheaply.

Enormous quantities of fruit are now put up in tin cans in this State; and you will be surprised, perhaps—­as I was the other day—­to hear of an orchard of peach and apricot trees, which bears this year (1873) its first full crop, and for one hundred acres of which the owners have received ten thousand dollars cash, gold, selling the fruit on the trees, without risk of ripening or trouble of picking.

Yet peaches and apricots are not the most profitable fruits in this State, for the cherry—­the most delicious cherries in the world grow here—­is worth even more; and I suspect that the few farmers who have orchards of plums, and carefully dry the fruit, make as much money as the cherry owners.  There has sprung up a very lively demand for California dried plums.  They bring from twenty to twenty-two cents per pound at wholesale in San Francisco, and even as high as thirty cents for the best quality; and I am told that last season a considerable quantity was shipped Eastward and sold at a handsome profit in New York.

The plum bears heavily and constantly north of Sacramento, and does not suffer from the curculio, and the dried fruit is delicious and wholesome.

Some day the farmers who are now experimenting with figs will, I do not doubt, produce also a marketable dried fig in large quantities.  At San Francisco, in October, 1873, I found in the shops delicious dried figs, but not in great quantities, nor so thoroughly dried as to bear shipment to a distance.  The tree nourishes in almost all parts of the State.  Usually it bears two and often three crops a year, and it grows into a noble and stately tree.