The Frenchman knows the importance of such things as that, has meals out of doors in fine weather, goes on little picnics, and keeps madame contented in the country.

A swing, or a seesaw, and a tether ball (a ball swinging from the top of a pole eight feet high) for the children will help to keep the family peace.

CHAPTER XIII

FRUITS

Fruit raising can succeed in either of two ways.  Either planting the orchard in some one fruit and specializing thereon, or diversifying the operation to cover many varieties.  In the first way it is usual to establish orchards in favorable localities without special regard to nearness to market; because in these days of refrigerator car lines the product of an orchard in any part of the country can be sent to market quickly enough to avoid loss.  Where many varieties are grown, the best site is usually near a large city where the grower can market his own product on wagons and get the benefit of retail prices.

Remember that it is far more profitable to raise twenty baskets of fine, well-shaped, clean, handsome apples or peaches or any other hand-eaten fruit, than to raise a hundred barrels of stuff that is good only for the common drier or for the mill or hogpen.

Care and common sense are the jackscrews to use in raising fine fruit.

The apple is the great American fruit for extensive orcharding.  The question is whether there is a profit in apple growing.  The answer is, where the conditions are favorable and when the business is well conducted there is.  Under average conditions, with poor business management, there is little or none.

As Professor S. T. Maynard in Suburban Life tells us, “In a suburban garden of one of our Eastern cities are seven Astrachan trees, about twenty years old, from which have been sold in a single season over one hundred dollars’ worth of fruit.  A friend near Boston put three thousand barrels of picked Baldwins into cold storage.  None of the fancy apples sold for less than three dollars a barrel, and the others netted more than two dollars.  They were the product of less than forty acres of trees which had been planted about twenty-five years.  Another fruit grower showed me several returns of commission men of five, six, and even seven dollars a barrel for fancy Baldwins.  At such prices, and under such conditions, there is a large profit in apple growing.”

“The other side of the picture, however, is the more common one.  A friend sent fifty barrels of fancy Baldwins to a commission house, to be shipped to European markets, the returns for which were just enough to pay for the barrels.  The majority of apples grown in the United States are sold to buyers, one buyer in each section, for a dollar to two dollars for No. 1 quality, and a dollar for No. 2.  With the cost of barrels at about forty cents, labor for picking, sorting, and packing, these prices leave little or nothing for the use of the land, cost of fertilizers, spraying, thinning, etc., all of which are necessary for growing fruit of the best quality.”