EARLY MORNING, YOSEMITE VALLEY.
The interest in a vineyard centers in the winery and the wine cellars. The grapes are first picked from the stems, then thrown into the great crushers, the juice flowing away through flumes to the fermenting vats. Asti boasts the largest wine-tank in the world. It is dug out of the soft stone which abounds in this country and lined with a thick layer of cement.
No less interesting is the cool, fragrant wine cellar. Here immense casks made of red wood stand upright, holding some of them, thirty gallons of wine.
When California was wild, the entire state was one sweet bee garden. Wherever a bee might fly, within the confines of this virgin wilderness, from forest to plain, from mountain to valley, from leafy glen to piny slope, chalices laden with golden nectar greeted him.
Those halcyon days of our humble brown friend are past. The plow and the sheep have played havoc with those once beautiful gardens. Now the lonely bee who would his trade pursue must fly far afield.
Traveling east and south from San Francisco, the fruit ranches are soon left behind and we enter the wheat district. Here we find no irrigation ditches. Every farm has a wind-mill, which pumps water for the stock and also for the orchard and garden. The yield of wheat is low, averaging only about twenty-five bushels to the acre.
This wheat is not used in the United States, being of a lower grade than Minnesota and Dakota wheat. It is shipped to the eastern markets, China, Japan and the Philippines.
We traveled one hundred and fifty miles through this district during the harvest. The combined harvester and thresher, drawn by forty mules, cuts a wide swath, threshes the grain at once, sacks it and dumps it on the ground ready for shipment. The wheat ripens during the dry season and so thoroughly that it can be threshed immediately after cutting. As the farmer has no fear of rain at this time of the year, he lets the sacks lie in the field until he is ready to sell.
The islands of the San Joaquin river are wonderfully fertile and many of them are under cultivation. The uncultivated islands produce every year a dense growth of bulrushes. Efforts have been made to utilize these in various ways.