THE GRAPE AND PEACH IN AMERICA.
The old saying about the inutility of carrying coals to Newcastle receives a new rendering in the fact that vine plants are being brought from America to replenish the vineyards of France, which have been in some instances devastated by the phylloxera. Grapes are now extensively grown in the United States both for dessert and wine-making. A lady who has recently been travelling in California, where the grape family is wonderfully numerous, and many of the vines exceptionally prolific, sometimes obtaining a ‘luxuriance which sounds almost incredible’—this lady—C. F. Gordon-Cumming—tells us, among other facts, of bunches of grapes which have been found to weigh as high as fifty pounds! The vineyards of Colonel Wilson, in the neighbourhood of the garden-city of Los Angeles, cover two hundred and fifty acres of ground, and the grapes yield one thousand gallons of wine to the acre. In another vineyard, there grow upwards of two hundred varieties of grapes; and in the cellars of its proprietor are stored two hundred thousand gallons of grape-juice, ripening into wine, of which many kinds are made in the state of California. Need it be said that grapes in these regions are cheap—a hatful can be purchased for a few cents! Only think of the above-named Colonel Wilson having ‘two and a half million pounds of grapes, hung up by their stalks, to keep them fresh for the market’! That fine fruit, the peach, is equally cheap in the peach-growing districts of the United States. The annual value of the American peach-crop is estimated at eleven and a half million pounds sterling. In some seasons, peaches are so abundant, that, to prevent their being lost, they are used in immense quantities for the feeding of pigs. Cannot this fruit be utilised for consumption in Europe? Supplies of the fresh fruit might be sent to us in the refrigerated chambers of the steamboats.