Harvest is a very busy time for fruit growers. Fruits, such as peaches!apricots, plums, and grapes, are spread on trays and put in the sun to dry. When dried, the fruit is sorted and packed into boxes. Many of the fresh fruits are taken to the canneries to be canned by thousands of women and girls.
201. Vegetables and the tale lands.— Near their mouths, the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers flow through many miles of swamp. This swamp is often overflowed in May and June, because the streams rise with floods of snow water that rush down from the high mountains. It has lately been discovered that when dikes are built to keep out the floods, these marshes may be made into the best of farmland. These lands, called " tules," are low, moist, rich, flat as a floor, and especially' suited to growing vegetables. Each spring, carloads of California lettuce, tomatoes, onions, celery, and asparagus go from the tule lands east of San Fran cisco to many eastern cities. In some places one may find a single field containing a thousand acres, in which there is only one kind of crop.
Much of the asparagus which is canned for the world's market is grown here.
202. Rice.—In 1909 a venturesome farmer north of Sacramento tried an experiment. He opened the dike that surrounded his low land and let the water flow into a field of newly-sown rice. He reaped a splendid harvest. The neighbors then experimented with their fields, and by 1916 there were 67,000 acres in rice. In 1920 there were 162,000 acres in rice, and California sur passed all other states in yield per acre.
203. Other agriculture.—In order to plant more land in fruit, the people have divided the old Spanish ranches having ten, twenty, or thirty thousands of acres into many little tracts of five, ten, or fifteen acres each. Thus hundreds, and even thousands, of people now live on the land that in 1870 or 1880 was just one big sheep or wheat ranch.
Wheat-growing has declined until Cali fornia now imports some wheat from other states. Barley, in a dry climate, thrives a little better than wheat, so barley is the chief grain which is grown in this region.
Most of it is fed to the ani mals, for Cali fornia has little corn. Corn is not grown much because the summer is too dry, and also because where the land can be irrf gated, other crops often pay better than corn un less it is grown for table use. California once imported butter from east of the Rocky Moun tains, but now she sends butter back to the East. She has butter to, export, because the irrigated alfalfa fields of the valleys, and the unirrigated barley fields on the slopes produce enough feed for many dairy cows.
Since corn is scarce, hogs also are scarce. In spring many sheep pasture on the slope above the orchard and farmland, but in summer they are taken up into the moun tains, often above the timber line, where their owners rent pasture in the national forests.
204. Cities, trade, and manufacture.— San Francisco is the natural metropolis, or leading city, of this region. It is located on a fine harbor, in the gateway to the Great Valley. How many people live in the cities on San Francisco Bay? Many railroads center there, and steamship lines reach out to Asia, Alaska, Australia, and South Amer ica. Lines of steamers go from San Fran cisco, through the Panama Canal, to the eastern states and to Europe. San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle are rivals, because each city wishes to be the metropolis of the Pacific coast.
The Panama Canal has greatly aided the people of the Pacific coast to market their produce in eastern cities. But Pacific steamship s, which used to unload Asiatic goods at Paci fic ports, to be sent across the continent by rail, now some times carry their freight on to the Atlantic ports. It seems that San Francisco and the neighboring cities of Oakland, Alameda, and Berkeley, will grow as their manufacturing increases, and as the valleys that are back of them increase their crops.
The other cities of these valleys, Santa Rosa, Sacramento, Stockton, San Jose, and Fresno, are busy with canneries, fruit-pack ing houses, and stores which supply the things that fruit-growers need.
The cities of Central California, like those of the southern part of the state (Sec. 190), have lacked coal, and therefore no iron has been produced. Materials for the steel shipyards, foundries, and machine shops at San Francisco have been imported from the East or from Europe. This lack of coal and iron held back the growth of manufacturing for a time, but cheap oil has of late been a great advantage. San Francisco has made machinery for local use, but her manufactured goods for export have been chiefly the things for which the native materials of California may be used, such as lumber, articles of wood, meat, and canned, dried, and preserved fruits and vegetables. Her manufactures are steadily increasing in variety.
205. Unused resources.—Plans are made to build a great irrigation canal at a high level along the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. It will extend from north to south for several hundreds of miles, bend around the southern end of the valley, and go up the western side. By this plan, water that now floods the marshes can be put to work; and idle land now producing only jack rabbits, horned toads, and a few sheep, can multiply the California fruit crop five-, or even ten fold, if the fruit is needed., It is fortunate that water to be used for irrigation can first be used for power. Thus storage of water for the field also increases the supply of water for the power plant, and therefore the two great industries of agriculture and manufacture help each other.