A Good Fruit Storehouse
If the fruit store has been used for other purposes in the summer, it is quite a good idea to have a general wash down and clean up late in September prior to attempting to store the apples and pears. Then, after cleaning, keep the door and window open at night time so as to let in the frosty air and then close down early in the morning, thus bottling up the coldness.
When properly bottled and wrapped in blue paper it is possible to keep plums perfectly for twenty years or more if need be, and the author has actually done this with success.
Before bringing the apples and pears into the store, it is a good plan to leave them out of doors in their boxes overnight so that they are exposed to low temperature and thus themselves will chill down. It is when they are at a low temperature in the morning that they can be brought into store.
Sometimes it is advisable to allow the fruits to sweat outside for a week or ten days before taking them into the storehouse. Some people prefer to take the boxes inside the store and allow the sweating to take place there. Thus they leave the windows and doors open day and night and then eventually close them down one early morning when the sweating process is over and while the air is still cool.
It is never worth while fitting a store with slatted shelves, as was done in the Victorian days. It is better to use what are called orchard boxes which contain a bushel of apples or orchard trays which contain exactly half a bushel. These orchard boxes, which can be obtained from a firm like Messrs.
Never attempt to wrap apples that have been bruised, that are scabbed, or that have been bored into by codling maggots. You cannot even store stalkless apples or pears. One can buy special oiled wrapping papers for the purpose, but ordinary sheets of newspaper, when cut up into squares about 10 inches by 10 inches are very good, presumably because of the oil content of the printers’ ink. An apple which has been properly wrapped in oiled paper and that does go rotten for some obscure reason is less able to infect the specimens next to it, and that is an extremely important point. As the wrapping tends to reduce the water loss instead of allowing it to escape, the process of overripening is delayed and the apple keeps longer in consequence.
