old in one
season $750 worth of cabbages.

The truth is that almost all the land is wonderfully productive if
intelligently handled. The low ground has water so near the surface that
the pulverized soil will draw up sufficient moisture for the crops; the
mesa, if sown and cultivated after the annual rains, matures grain and
corn, and sustains vines and fruit-trees. It is singular that the first
settlers should never have discovered this productiveness. When it
became apparent--that is, productiveness without artificial
watering--there spread abroad a notion that irrigation generally was not
needed. We shall have occasion to speak of this more in detail, and I
will now only say, on good authority, that while cultivation, not to
keep down the weeds only, but to keep the soil stirred and prevent its
baking, is the prime necessity for almost all land in Southern
California, there are portions where irrigation is always necessary, and
there is no spot where the yield of fruit or grain will not be
quadrupled by judicious irrigation. There are places where irrigation is
excessive and harmful both to the quality and quantity of oranges and
grapes.

The history of the extension of cultivation in the last twenty and
especially in the past ten years from the foot-hills of the Sierra Madre
in Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties southward to San Diego is
very curious. Experiments were timidly tried. Every acre of sand and
sage-bush reclaimed southward was supposed to be the last capable of
profitable farming or fruit-growing. It is unsafe now to say of any land
that has not been tried that it is not good. In every valley and on
every hill-side, on the mesas and in the sunny nooks in the mountains,
nearly anything will grow, and the application of water produces
marvellous results. From San Bernardino and Redlands, Riverside, Pomona,
Ontario, Santa Anita, San Gabriel, Pasadena, all the way to Los Angeles,
is almost a continuous fruit garden, the green areas only emphasized by
wastes yet unreclaimed; a land of charming cottages, thriving towns,
hospitable to the fruit of every clime; a land of perpetual sun and
ever-flowing breeze, looked down on by purple mountain ranges tipped
here and there with enduring snow. And what is in progress here will be
seen before long in almost every part of this wonderful land, for
conditions of soil and climate are essentially everywhere the same, and
capital is finding out how to store in and b