Daily Yellowstone Journal

TROPICAL PRODUCTIONS ASSURED

The Remarkable Future of Fruit Culture in Southern California.

The time is not distant when this corner of the United States will produce in abundance, and year after year without failure, all the fruits and nuts which for a thousand years the civilized world of Europe has looked to the Mediterranean to supply. We shall not need any more to send over the Atlantic for raisins, English walnuts, almonds, figs, olives, prunes, oranges, lemons, limes and a variety of other things which we know commercially as Mediterranean products.

We have all this luxury and wealth at our doors, within our limits. The orange and the lemon we shall still bring from many places; the date, and the pineapple, and the banana will never grow here except as illustrations of the climate, but it is difficult to name any fruit of the temperate and semi-tropic zones that southern California cannot be relied on to produce, from the guava to the peach.

It will need further experiment to determine what are the more profitable products of this soil, and it will take longer experience to cultivate them and send them to market in perfection. The pomegranate and the apple thrive side by side, but the apple is not good here unless it is grown at an elevation where frost is certain and occasional snow may be expected.

There is no longer any doubt about the peach, the nectarine, the pear, the grape, the orange, the lemon, the apricot, and so on; but I believe that the greatest profit will be in the products that cannot be grown elsewhere in the United States—the products to which we have long given the name of Mediterranean—the olive, the fig, the raisin, the hard and soft shell almond and the walnut. The orange will of course be staple, and constantly improve its reputation as better varieties are raised and the right amount of irrigation to produce the finest and the sweetest is ascertained.—Charles Dudley Warner

In Harper's