The Daily News WEDNESDAY, APRIL 18. FRUIT-A GREAT LUXURY.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume XLVII, Issue 8087, 18 April 1906, Page 2

The Daily News WEDNESDAY, APRIL 18. FRUIT-A GREAT LUXURY.

It is invigorating to read that the Department of Tourists and Industries will exhibit, some New Zealand fruit at the Royal Agricultural Society's Show in London in the near future. New Zealanders who have never seen any New Zealand fruit closer than through the panes of a shop window, should take a £l2 passage to London, and gaze on the luscious luxuries. The first point that strikes us about this action of the Go vernment is that if it is going to exhibit the fruit at Home, it evidently desires to get a market for it in the Old Land. Fruit is dearer in New Zealand than in most other countries. There are many and various reasons for this, but the chief reason why fruit is not plentiful and cheap 1 is that the man ou the land, in a great many cases, is dead tired, The retailer is not to blame. He has to pay big prices himself.

* # # * Fruit-growing requires less land than the growing of almost anything else, but fruit requires constant attention, and tired men haven't time for a business in which there are splendid profits to be made, but much work to do. Many people on the land in New Zealand expect the land to do all the work. Large numbers of small sheep men buy the class of sheep that are the least trouble. Two or three musters a year for branding, docking, dipping, and shearing, and the work is practically done. Plenty of sheep-farmers don't know a Southdown from a Leicester, nor a lock of merino wool from a lock of crossbred. They are too tired. It is easier to surface-sow a few pounds of cocksfoot or a peck or two of ryegrass, than to break up ground for fruit orchards, to plant it, to keep cultivating it, to prune the trees, and to keep going day in and day out, until the man on the land is so busy that he isn't quite sure whether he'll be able to get to that meeting to ventilate farmers' grievances to-morrow or the next day.

* * # * Hundseds of farmers 111 New Zealand with land that would grow almost any fruit crop, never eat any fruit, unless it is Californian fruit out of cans. Indeed, the average small sheep-farmer hardly ever grows a cabbage or a potato. He is too tired. The ground has to be ploughed and broken up to plant things. A few Government experts show the world what New Zealand can do in the way of fruit-growing, but no one takes much notice, In Australia, which is not the superior of New Zealand for growing fruit requiring a fairly temperate climate, one might absolutely live on fruit for about •Is 6d a week, and one would certainly be a good deal healthier than the clamper and mutton person in New Zealand who refuses to plant trees Fruit is an absolute necessity to the average man.

# . « * * To the average New Zealander it is a luxury, and the average New Zealander who sees the exhibition of lubcious luxuries in the Royal Agricultural Hall at Islington will probably swell his manly bosom and dilate on the glories of a laud that can grow such " whoppers "-for the Old Conn try. 'fhe quaint thing about this presumable bid for an English market for New Zealand fruit, is that the Londoner can get fruit almost as cheap in Covent Gardens as he could anywhere iu the world. What is the good of selling New Zealand pears at three-halfpence a pound to a Cockney, when New Zealanders are perishing for pears three times as indifferent for three times the money ? The only advice possible in this connection is for the Government to distend the waistband of New Zealanders with the best kind of fruit, before attempting to exaggerate the rotundity of John Bull with fruit we can't afford to let him have. Let the small land-holder cease from being tired, and get to work with plough and cultivator and pruning knife, so that the New Zealander may not faint with surprise when he sees locallygrown fruit asking to he bought at prices that are not ruinous.