12/17 Think of honey made from orange flowers selling at five cents a pound! A clergyman writing of Santa Barbara County says that twenty-five years ago all their vegetables were imported. Now beans yield a ton to the acre, potatoes two hundred and fifty bushels per acre, and he has seen potatoes that weighed six, seven, and eight and a half pounds--as much as an ordinary baby; beets, seventy-five tons to the acre; carrots, thirty. Mr.Webster once declared in Congress that this State could never raise a bushel of grain. Corn yields fifty bushels to the acre; barley, sixty; wheat, thirty. Others give much higher records: corn, one hundred and thirty bushels; barley, eighty; potatoes, four hundred; forty tons of squashes, four tons of hay, sixty tons of beets. |