be
discarded at picking time. The presence of only a few inferior fruits in
a lot will bring the price down considerably. The same holds true with
berries, and is even more important, for if one berry rots it soon
spreads disease to the other berries. For this reason the sorting out of
all inferior fruit is essential, even more so than grading.

The grading aids in getting better prices but is not necessary for
profitable results. If small fruit is well sorted, the growers claim
that it is not necessary to grade it, for the fruit will then be fairly
uniform.

With apples, grading is distinctly beneficial. Many marketable apples
may be blemished so that their appearance is hurt, while their keeping
and shipping qualities are but slightly injured. The best grade must
contain apples uniform in size, shape and color, and free from all
blemishes. Hence it is readily seen why at least two grades are
essential. The growers at Mankato do not grade their apples to more than
one grade and this amounts only to sorting. The best of the commercial
apple growers carefully sort out the small and injured fruits, but a
large portion of the growers even neglect this to some extent.

The method of packing the fruit is very variable, and in fact a large
part of it is not packed at all. Most of the small fruit growers use the
sixteen quart crate, while the apple, if it is packed at all, is packed
in barrels. One requirement of a package is that it be clean, and if it
must be clean a secondhand package cannot be used. Many fall down here
by using secondhand, odd sized and dirty crates or barrels. The shipping
crate should be kept out of the field and off of the ground. The place
for it is in the packing house.

The apple growers often take their barrels into the field to fill them
and thus more or less soil them. This is not done to any great extent at
Mankato, for most of the barrel packing is done at the fruit houses, the
growers bringing in the apples loose in a wagonbox. This is a good
system as the apples are only handled three times: from the tree to the
picking basket, from the picking basket to the wagonbox, and from here
into barrels. By this method the apples are sorted both at the picking
and barreling time. If the apples are to be graded or packed at the
farm, a packing house should be provided at or near the orchard.

It is needless to speak of the slack and inefficient method of marketing
apples in sacks, salt barrels and