Our Italy

may be said to begin with December and end in April; summer, with May (whose days, however, are often cooler than those of January), and end w

fruit on contiguous ground fifty or a hundred feet higher? We boast about many things in the United States, about our blizzards and our cyclones, our inundations and our areas of low pressure, our hottest and our coldest places in the world, but what can we say for this little corner which is practically frostless, and yet never had a sunstroke, knows nothing of thunder-storms and lightning, never experienced a cyclone, which is so warm that t

SAN BER

ow underground in the summer months (or, as the Californians say, the bed of the river gets on top), but most of them can be used for artificial irrigation. In the lowlands water is sufficiently near the surface to moisten the soil, which is broken and cultivated; in most regions good wells are reached at a small depth, in others artesian-wells spout up abunda

ttle and sheep for corn, grain, and garden vegetables; they had no faith that they could grow cereals, and it was too much trouble to procure water for a garden or a fruit orchard. It was the firm belief that most of the rolling mesa land was unfit for cultivation, and that neither forest nor fruit trees would grow without irrigation. Between Los Angeles and Redondo Beach is a ranch of 35,000 acres. Seventeen years ago it was owned by a Scotchman, who used the whole of it as a sheep ranch. In selling it to the present owner he warned him not to w

NTECITO AND

verized by the cultivator. It looks like a barren waste. We passed a tract that was offered three years ago for twelve dollars an acre. Some of it no

never have discovered this productiveness. When it became apparent-that is, productiveness without artificial watering-there spread abroad a notion that irrigation generally was not needed. We shall have occasion to speak of this more in detail, and I will now only say, on good authority, that while cultivation, not to keep down the weeds only, but to keep the soil s

ll-side, on the mesas and in the sunny nooks in the mountains, nearly anything will grow, and the application of water produces marvellous results. From San Bernardino and Redlands, Riverside, Pomona, Ontario, Santa Anita, San Gabriel, Pasadena, all the way to Los Angeles, is almost a continuous fruit garden, the green areas only emphasized by wastes yet unreclaimed; a land of charming cottages, thriving towns, hospitable to the fruit of every clime; a land of perpetual sun and ever-flowing

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ounty alone is as large as Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island combined, and the amount of arable land in the valleys, on the foot-hills, on the rolling mesas, is enormous, and capable of sustaining a dense population, for its fertility and its yield to the acre under cultivation are incomparable. The reader will also notice another thing. With the railroads

urple hills running to the blue sea, its surrounding mesas and ca?ons blooming in semi-tropical luxuriance, some conjunction of shore and mountain, some golden color, some white light and sharply defined shadows, some refinement of lines, some poetic tints in violet and ashy ranges, some ultramarine in the sea, or delicate blue

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 w

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

t to Eastern markets whose sole recommendation was size. Even in the vineyards and orange orchards quality has been sacrificed to quantity. Nature here responds generously to every encouragement, but it cannot be forced without taking its revenge in the return of inferior quality. It is just as true of Southern California as of any other land, that hard work and sagacity and experience are necessary to successful horticulture and agriculture, but it is undeniably true that the same amount of well-directed industry upon a much smaller area of land will produce more return than in almost any other section of the United States. Sensible people do not any longer pay much attention to those tempting little arithmetical sums by which it is demonstr

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mall grove or highway avenue will in four or five years furnish a family with its firewood. The strong, fattening alfalfa gives three, four, five, and even six harvests a year. Nature needs little rest, and, with the encouragement of water and fertilizers, apparently none. But all this prodigality and easiness