et; 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."

Holmes further says, in substance, that we must make the tree