The Raisin Industry / A practical treatise on the raisin grapes, their history, culture and curing

by Gustavus A. Eisen

A trip to Orange reveals the very same features, only we pass through a more fertile country, with vineyards and orchards on every side, orange groves of various ages, walnut orchards, fields of tall corn, peanuts, beans and melons. Between all wind the shaded avenues with pepper and gum, cypress, pine or yellow flowering grevillea. The soil is everywhere of the richest kind, of a color between ashy green and chocolate. Nowhere have we seen such magnificent Indian corn,—whole fields where the stalks are from twelve to sixteen feet high. Orange is a more pretentious town than Tustin, but hardly any more beautiful, and far less secluded and quiet. There are two large and fine hotels, the one of brick being in town, while the other, the family hotel, lies in the suburbs in bowers of evergreen trees and gardens. In the middle of the town there is a plaza with a fountain and an exquisite little garden well planned and better kept. The lawns are like the softest velvet, and are bordered with blue and green flowers, with beds of sweetest mignonette, while bananas and palms spread their stately foliage in the center.

The climate of this part of Southern California is excellent. The thermometer stands at midday at eighty in the shade; in the evening there is always a breeze. Many of those I meet complain as usual, and greet me with the inevitable, “How warm it is to-day,” and our as inevitable answer is, that we cannot feel it, and that it just seems delightful to us. People here observe and feel the changes of temperature much more than we do farther north. With us they share the habit of complaining even if there is nothing to complain of.

The vineyards of Santa Ana have suffered much from a vine disease which may be compared with consumption or the Oriental plague in man. But every one thinks here that the pest will run its course and become harmless, and even now some of the vineyards are being replanted with fresh vines. The oranges do eminently well, but they must be sprayed and constant watch kept for the red scale imported here from Australia by an enterprising nurseryman. The plantations of walnuts are being rapidly extended, and nurseries of young walnut trees just appearing above the ground are seen in many places, the plants probably amounting to millions. The walnut generally planted is the seedling soft-shell and the common Santa Ana walnut, than which there is none choicer and more valued on the coast. Prunes are also a favorite crop, and pay well if not allowed to overbear, in which case the succeeding crop will be small. The same may be said of the apricot. These trees are here fine and healthy, and of a deeper and finer green than is seen almost anywhere else; but last year the trees bore too much, and this year the crop is by far not what it should be.

The resources of this country are such that the partial failure of a single crop will cause no serious injury. New resources are developed every day; there are few plants that do not thrive here. In the gardens as well as in the fields we see the tender semi-tropical plants, which cannot stand any frost, growing close to varieties from the North. Bananas, date palms, walnuts and oranges grow in the same field with peaches, apples and prunes. Pepper and camphor trees and the tender grevillea are on one side of the avenue, while on the other side we may find elm, eucalyptus or even the beautiful umbrella.

Irrigation is practiced on every farm. Fifteen thousand acres are covered by water stock, but not all irrigated yet. Just now the orange groves are irrigated, and I observe their methods. The land is always leveled before anything is planted, as there is too little water here to waste any on unlevel land. One way to irrigate an orchard is to plow furrows in between the rows of trees, and then let the water run in them. Another way is to check the whole orchard with small levees, inclosing thus a little square around every tree, and the square check of one tree meeting the same of the adjoining tree. This is actually flooding the land. Deciduous trees and vines grow without irrigation, but to get a good crop irrigation is necessary. The large, dry and rocky creek beds speak of the water that is wasted in winter time in flowing to the sea. Practically nothing of it is then saved. Irrigation districts under the Wright law are formed and forming, and everybody seems hopeful that in course of time there will be water enough to irrigate all the land that is good enough to be irrigated. Some of the finest ranches in the State lie right at the feet of Santa Ana. The San Joaquin ranch contains one hundred thousand acres, I am told, and it is not yet cut up, and thus some of the best land around Santa Ana is yet only used as pasture. The owners failed to sell in the time of the boom and must now wait until the land that is already covered with ditches will be fully settled before they can sell, but the time, we predict, is not very far off.

SANTA ANA TO SAN DIEGO.

A railroad trip from Santa Ana to San Diego offers many points of interest. It carries us through both the most highly cultivated and through the absolutely vacant, not to say barren, lands. We leave the orange grove and walnut plantations of Santa Ana, and are carried almost immediately past the lovely and shaded Tustin, where pepper groves and lime hedges, gardens and splendid villas, combine nature with art, taste and enterprise to create a veritable oasis for those favored ones who can remain there. We rush for a few minutes through these highly cultivated lands, and suddenly find ourselves out on a wide, open plain, comprising about eighty thousand acres, without a house to be seen anywhere, with no orchards, no vineyards, no signs of civilized life. And still the soil is the richest, the native vegetation of grasses the most luxuriant. The soil is apparently subirrigated, and could grow almost anything the farmer might plant there. Along the horizon, stretching from the mountains way down on the plains like an immense plumed serpent in its wavy and coiling track, is seen a continuous band of sycamore trees, outlining the bed of a stream. It is like stepping out of one room into another. What can be the reason of the sudden change? This vast body of land, containing over 126,000 acres, is an old Mexican grant, the remnant of one of those Mexican cancers, which to such an extent has retarded the development of California. Sure enough, we see wire fences everywhere, and cattle with spreading horns and sheep without number. But we see no sign of the cultivator, no horses, no signs of progress. The owner held onto the land, probably expecting it to bring a price many times the sum it was worth. He died, and so died the boom, and now the land is under administration. When the time comes that this large San Joaquin grant can be sold to farmers in small tracts, it will very greatly increase the cultivable area of Orange county.

But we pass on, leaving the open country; we are soon in among the rolling lands, among foothills not unlike those of the Sierra Nevada in the San Joaquin valley. To the left are the San Bernardino Mountains, here and there a peak of boldest outline, and streams and cañons winding their way to the sea. At El Toro a number of passengers got off to take the stage to Laguna, a seaside hotel, where the farmers and business men of every color, from the heated interior valleys, delight to spend a day in fishing, hunting for abalones, or in watching the breakers roll against the sandy beach. A little farther on we stop at El Capistrano, or rather at San Juan Capistrano, the old ruined mission, situated in the most beautiful little valley, with its winding and sycamore shaded creek. The mission must have been one of the very largest in the State. The ruins are yet very extensive, consisting of long and regular adobe walls, and one-half of a yet magnificent looking church, in the regular Spanish style of architecture. A rather large size town of Mexican houses, with a Mexican population, and venerable fig trees, tall and wavy palm trees, and large but unkempt gardens, give the place a rather more important look than it perhaps deserves. There is but little sign that the boom was ever here. Still the valley is so beautiful and evidently so fertile, that it needs only work and taste to make it equal to the very best. We see yet the old mission pear trees, large and untrimmed, not unlike our drooping oaks, loaded with pears to such an extent that there appears hardly room for a blackbird to get through. The mission grapevines are all dead. Gigantic vines, which covered trellises and arbors, and which perhaps bore tons of grapes, with trunks as heavy as the body of a boy, are there yet, but without leaves and young shoots; they are dead, having surrendered to the vine pest of the country.

After leaving Capistrano we follow the little creek to the sea. The valley is from one-half to one mile wide. Here and there are flourishing little vineyards, but mostly pastures and cornfields or patches of beans. At last we reach the sea, the Pacific, calm and blue, with breakers lashing the shore. To the right we leave the rocky promontory of the Capistrano Mountains, and for an hour or more run on the very beach. In stormy weather the spray of the breakers must wet the cars, which run only a stone’s throw from the water’s edge. This part of the route is the most interesting and the most refreshing to one coming from the interior plains. We are now in San Diego county. The shore is abrupt and bluffy, the hills bordering on the sea.

At Oceanside we meet the first of the boom towns, one of those that sprang up for pleasure and profit, towns of magnificent villas, broad streets and avenues, lined with infant blue gums, with rows and hedges of the ever-bright geraniums, and with large and splendid-looking hotels, with airy balconies, verandas and lookout towers, swept by the fresh breezes of the sea. The vicinity of every such station is heralded by the characteristic white stakes that mark the town lots, and by rows of small, intensely blue, gums; by a sprinkling of cottages, small and large, perhaps a mile or two before the whistle of the steam-engine brings us to a standstill. The first things that meet our eye at every station are large and splendid lawns, young plantations of palm trees and other plants characteristic of the Southern coast climate, flowers of brightest hue, all started by the enterprising immigrants who came here to buy climate, sun and air, and to enjoy the breakers and the ocean every day in the year. After Oceanside, we touch at Carlsbad and Del Mar, both seaside resorts with magnificent villas costing from twenty to forty thousand dollars each, and with fine but young plantations and gardens. I was especially charmed with Del Mar, with its large, tasteful hotel on the bluff, and quite a large colony of villas and mansions in various sizes and styles close around,—a bright and charming picture, a place where a traveler feels at home at once, where he would like to pass the balance of all the days he can spare from business and toil.