BOUT half a mile from where I write is a piece of sandy soil near the Alameda creek. Twenty years ago it was consid -ered too poor for anything but pasture. Now it is worked by several Italian gardeners who supply this part of the valley, and are growing rich from less than five acres of land, for which they pay a yearly rental of $150. They irrigate constantly, and use an enormous amount of stable-manure, as all successful truck-gardeners do, but the especial feature of their system that would interest a man from the Atlantic states is that they use every inch of their land for every day of the year. As in Italy, or Spain, the climate is always in their favor. I should hesitate to say what this land is worth as they use it - it supports five men, and two families. Across the lane is a tract of twenty acres of rather better land, farmed by an old-time agriculturist, who gets one crop a year. This season he had, on twenty acres, about $150 worth of hay, above expenses, or not more than the rental value of the smaller tract.

The development of the truck-farming business of late years in California has been quite as remarkable as that of the orchard and vineyard interests, but, strange to say, one hears very little about it. As a shipping industry, it is, of course, in winter-grown vegetables that the bulk of the increase has occurred.

I can best illustrate the ordinary condition of the San Francisco winter markets, to which all the earliest districts are tributary, by copying from my note-book a list made at the time that the great snow storm in the Sierras blockaded all the trains: endive, leeks, kohl rabi, spinach, asparagus, green peas, string beans, cucumbers, lettuce, artichokes, tomatoes, salsify, celery, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, cabbages, new potatoes, sweet potatoes, rhubarb, young onions, turnips, radishes, cress, fresh okra, parsley, kale - all grown in the open air. Peas and string beans are in market every day in the year.

Carloads of vegetables are shipped to the mining camps of the Rockies, and to Chicago, but the business is as yet only in its infancy. Last year the railroads carried about fifty million pounds of vegetables out of California. Judging from the feeling in the leading vegetable districts, five years will see this output trebled. Capital is taking hold of the business, and while it is especially attractive to foot-hill farmers and colonists, some large tracts in the valley near San Francisco are considered worth more in vegetables than in orchards.

The first ripe tomatoes that I saw in San Francisco this year were from the Los Angeles region, and sold for forty cents a pound. Vacaville sends the best of the early tomatoes, as a rule, and the best early cucumbers. There are a great many places in the California foot-hills as far north as Red Bluffs where strawberries ripen in the open air all winter, where red peppers keep on blooming and ripening, and where water-melon vines grow without ceasing. I have seen all the leading sorts of vegetables grown in the open air in December and January in various places in Shasta, Tehama, Butte, El Dorado, Placer, Solano, Santa Clara, Alameda, and many other northern and central counties, as well as in the famous counties of the southern end of the state. By April cartloads of peas and tomatoes can be gathered ; by May string beans are abundant. A letter from Los Angeles says :

" From the first of December to the end of April cauliflower, celery and cabbage should be shipped from here by the hundred tons. From the 1st of April to the end of June tomatoes, green peas, new potatoes and string beans ought to be shipped." The same is true of the warm slopes of the Santa Cruz coast range and the Mission Peak and Livermore districts, where, if necessary, ten thousand acres could be planted in early vegetables.

A truck-farmer near Oroville has lately printed a statement of his operations. He employs fourteen men on forty acres, planted in orchard and vegetables. The crop of 1889 was as follows :

"Peaches, eighty tons; apples, twelve tons; pears, three tons; apricots, ten tons; nectarines, ten tons ; plums, four tons; blackberries, ten tons; raspberries, one and a half tons ; strawberries, two and a half tons ; grapes, twenty tons; quinces, two and a half tons ; cherries, two tons; figs, one ton; potatoes, thirty tons; onions, twenty-five tons; cabbage, twenty tons; cauliflower, one and a half tons ; carrots, five tons; parsnips, five tons; beets, three tons ; sweet-potatoes, four tons; water-melons, a hundred tons; musk-melons, twenty-five tons: cucumbers, two and a half tons; peas, three tons; beans, four tons; turnips, seven tons; rutabagas, two tons; green corn, ten tons; squash and pumpkins, four tons ; tomatoes, forty tons ; green peppers and okra. half a ton ; lettuce, spinach, radishes, celery, asparagus and artichokes, ten tons in all".

The most noted truck-gardening ever done in California was in pioneer days, when one man made $40,000 in one season out of watermelons, and another cleared $160,000 on potatoes, corn, beans, cabbages, etc., which brought enormous prices in the mines. Potatoes being worth $50 a sack, every valley farmer planted them the next year, and thousands of sackfulls rotted in the field, not being worth the digging. The largest crops of potatoes now grown in California come from the reclaimed t u 1 e lands. The best in point of quality are from the rich mountain valleys. As high as two hundred and fifty sacks, weighing about thirteen tons, are sometimes ob. tained from an acre. In Humboldt county, last year, four hundred and ninety tons were dug from forty-five acres of bottom land that had not been cropped for years, and had never received any fertilizers whatever. The Colorado potato-beetle has never been seen in California, and potato rot is extremely rare. The only disease known, and that at long intervals and on limited areas, is the potato blight.

Of late years, the "early districts" are being planted extensively to "new potatoes," which are more and more in demand. In Alameda county, last year, a Portuguese truck-farmer rented hill land at $5 an acre, and cleared, I am told, nearly $200 an acre in "early potatoes." The experiment of shipping to New York will probably be tried next year.

Beans are becoming one of the most notable of California crops. It takes fourteen hundred freight cars to carry the bean surplus east, and the state undoubtedly leads all others in the Union, not merely in the famous Lima bean, but in all other kinds also. The "bean-belt" begins in the warmer portions of Alameda and Santa Clara, and becomes important in Monterey ; but San Luis Obispo, Ventura and Santa Barbara are the centers of the industry. The total bean output of the state is about forty million pounds, worth fully a million dollars in the field. The requisites of a bean farm are a rich soil, and a climate that ripens the beans up evenly, so as to get the largest possible crop. Lima beans last year paid the grower from $100 to $250 per acre, and as a Santa Paula correspondent recently wrote of the Ventura country : "Bean planters, bean hoes, bean cutters, bean pullers, bean threshers, bean cleaners, bean buyers, bean experts, bean agents and bean patch mashers - mighty is bean down this way! The bean industry in this section has reached proportions little expected a few years ago, and to-day your correspondent finds families comfortably situated and well-to-do, who came here, only yesterday, as it were, flat broke, and they have demonstrated that any industrious family can 'get there' on a small farm by cultivating beans".

A California Squash Field.

At the present time the chief products from tomato culture are from the very early crop. The "main crop" is often worthless and decays on the vines. The excellence of the tomatoes, as grown in our rainless summers, is unquestionable. During the past three or four years the tomato seed industry has become important, but a small acreage will supply the demand for that purpose. In Los Angeles, the growers sell to canners at $8 ton ; in Santa Clara the price is but $6. the fruit to be picked and delivered. If even this very low price could be maintained, however, an unlimited supply might be furnished with profit to the growers, so large is the yield ; but the canneries are often glutted, and the quotations are but nominal.

The beet sugar factories promise large results. J. B. Hudson, of Watsonville, last year grew 8,4x7 pounds of sugar per acre on a tract of ten acres, and won a prize of $500 from Mr. Claus Spreckles. From a thousand acres cultivated in this district, fifteen thousand tons of beets were dug, for which the farmer received $5.25 per ton. Some of the beets yielded over 20 per cent. of sugar. No crop is more important, in view of the great and increasing demands of the canners for a cheap and good sugar, and even the free traders in California desire the beet sugar industry to have a chance to get under way. Table beets are grown all the year round, and are one of the cheapest vegetables in the markets.

Among the vegetables that are abundant and cheap in California the egg-plant deserves mention. The fruit, as seen in the market is often from eight to ten inches in diameter, and of most excellent quality. The cauliflower is extremely abundant. Watermelons are often "on hand" for Thanksgiving, and sometimes even for a New Year's dinner. Sweet corn continues from early spring to November. Carrots and beets are grown for cattle-feed, and generally stay in the field until wanted for use. Turnips are not a field crop, except in some of the northern coast counties.

In conclusion, the cost of "California vegetables at home" is perhaps worth a word from the housekeeper's standpoint. A young couple built a little cottage and began housekeeping. The investment of five cents at the door when the vegetable peddler came round daily, the housewife found, procured "three tomatoes, two cucumbers, and about four turnips," all large, fresh, and the best of the season. Other vegetables were about the same price, except cauliflowers, an extra fine head of which costs five cents. An average expenditure of five cents a day, the year round, was sufficient to get vegetables for a vegetable-loving family of two.

Charles H. Shinn.