BY

I'

F YOU will come with me this brilliant, bird-singing morning-and it is in January that I write-we shall look down upon one of the fairest scenes in the world, and, beyond all its beauty, a most practical place, rich beyond measure and throbbing with industrial life. Far down beFar down below us, between the mountains and the sea, lies the Santa Clara Valley, where the world's seeds are raised. Not all of them, to be sure, but a vast amount.

The situation is ideal. Just beyond the valley to the right runs a spur of the Coast Range, with the snowy dome of Lick Observatory on the top of Mount Hamilton plainly showing forty miles away. Just below our feet we may see a huge Catholic training school for priests; and hard by is the trail, so it is said, over which the mission fathers toiled up to this rich valley in the days when the land was Spain's. To the left is a low range of mountains, melting off in the purple distance to the sea; far in front is the great Bay of San Francisco-you may see its shimmer there in the warm sunlight; and just beyond lies San Francisco, pulling itself nobly together.

The sun shines in this valley nearly all the year; the soil is of inexhaustible richness; the climate is particularly fitted for the growth and development of seed-bearing plants of commercial value. Hemmed in by mountains which temper the hot summer winds from the interior and the colder winds from the ocean in winter, the valley presents ideal conditions for this peculiar industry, the greatest of its kind in the world.

Look past the thousands of acres of fruit trees hastening on these warm days to bud and burst into a great pink and white sea, and you will note the red roofs of small towns with dark places near them, picked out in the landscape by lines of green-the stately live-oaks and the lofty eucalyptus. These dark places, thousands

of acres of them, are the seed farms. In this lovely valley lying below us and stretching around beyond the elbow of the foothills to the right, are nearly 10,000 acres of land given up to the raising of vegetable and flower seeds. Seed growing has been an occupation in this region for years, but it is within the past five or six years that it has approached its present magnitude. While there is great difference in the yield of various seeds, running from 200 to nearly 2,000 pounds to the acre, it is likely that an average of 500 pounds would be a conservative figure-making the total output for the last five years something like 25,000,000 pounds of seeds. The acreage is steadily increasing to keep pace with the enormous demand. Onion seed will average about 400 pounds to the acre, though often higher than this; lettuce, 500; carrot, 800: peas from 800 to 1,000 pounds, and in some seasons much more. The sweet peas average high, as much as 1,500 pounds frequently being raised on an

acre.

Think of a single field with four hundred acres of sweet peas in blossom at one time!

You buy a package of seeds for your garden— lettuce, sweet peas, or onions, or parsnips, or some fine flower you have long loved. The package bears the name of some well-known seedsman; it is not unlikely that the name has been a household word for a generation. But it is ten chances to one that he is not the grower of the seed but only the seller; ten chances to one it was grown here in this wide Santa Clara Valley, with the blue California sky bending above it. The seed-seller contracts to buy of the seed-grower certain quantities of the seeds designated. The seedgrower agrees that he will " cause to have planted seeds or roots sufficient ordinarily to produce the quantities to be sold, provided the season permits the growing of the same." The seed-grower goes further and says that

he will agree to plant one acre of red or yellow varieties of onions, for example, for every 400 pounds contracted for, and one acre for every 300 pounds of white varieties; that he will plant an acre of carrot or radish seed for every 1,000 pounds contracted for; and so on.

THE ENDLESS VARIETY OF SEEDS

I would not attempt to say how many kinds of seeds are raised on these seed ranches, but the number is very large. I notice in one catalogue over 300 varieties offered for sale, though perhaps not all these may have been raised on the ranches; for certain seeds, it is true, do not here become commercially profitable. But in one contract noted, which provides for growing standard well-known seeds, I find four varieties of asparagus seed; five of cauliflower; fifteen of carrot; eleven of celery; one of collards; four of endive; one each of cabbage and Brussels sprouts; three each of kale and kohlrabi; seventy-four varieties of

lettuce would you believe there were so many? -three of leeks; six of mustard, thirty-five of onion; four of parsley; three of parsnips; thirty-two of radish; two of salsify; five each of squash and spinach.

Then came the flower seeds-raised by the thousands of pounds to be sold by the ounce. Eighty-six varieties of sweet peas were listed, but there are over 300 varieties which one firm has grown, annually being added to as the taste changes. Love of novelty must be satisfied. The fashion just now, one grower told me, is for sweet peas of extraordinarily large size and with fluted petals. He thought the limit in color had almost been reached. Nearly a thousand acres of sweet peas are in blossom over there, just around that spur of the mountain, when the summer is well advanced. It is not given to type to describe their beauty or fragrance.

Then there are thirty kinds of aster to choose from; one each of balsam, calendula, cen

taurea, gypsophila, and pinks; three each of giant cosmos and candytuft; four each of mignonette and poppy; ten each of phlox and verbena, and fifty-three of nasturtium. And what a bewildering lot of beautiful names these flowers and vegetables have acquired! One wonders how the growers thought them all out.

If we clamber down the mountain side we may catch the puffing train and ride up the valley where the seeds are growing. Sprouting would be a better term for January, for the workmen are still planting. It is a scene of activity when the seeding is on, second only to

the harvest time. Some of the seeds are sown in drills by machine-those which must have regular rows with room for cultivation. Some are sown by hand. The onion bulbs from which the seeds grow are planted by hand in long rows, the bulbs four inches or so apart. Going around the spur of the mountains to a large ranch, I saw long rows of Chinamen and Japanese kneeling by the side of the furrow the plow had made, setting onions in place amidst no end of Oriental jargon. One stalwart fellow passed down the line, distributing the onions loosely in the furrow in advance of the planters. When you were still a block

away you might know they were onions, those long rows of yellow bulbs stretching away so far in the distance, by the odor that smites the air.

Chinese and Japanese, they do the work. The teamsters are white men, using that term as distinguishing from the Mongolian; the overseers and heads of departments are white. Man after man, as I passed along the bent rows of Chinamen putting the bulbs in place, had an iron-gray cue tucked away under his skull-cap. They are aging fast, these old fellows; the day of the Chinaman in America

PREPARING LETTUCE SEED FOR FLAILING

is fixed. Another generation and there will be none left. But the Jap is here in all his youth and exuberance, not so good a workman as the Chinaman, not so reliable in the mass, the manager tells me as we watch them at

CHINESE FLAILING OUT LETTUCE SEED

their work; but he is clean and quick and deft beyond measure with those Oriental fingers of his. He is working here, too, for less money than an American laborer could be hired for. Still, though these Chinese and Japanese laborers work cheap for not more than $1.50 a day at the outside they draw in the busiest season of the year fully $60,000 a month in wages. When the harvest is on there will be fully 2,000 of them at work.

There are 2,500 acres of land in this one seed ranch, all given up to the raising of garden seeds. As level as a floor the valley lies, stretching across to the foothills miles away. It is a fair, peaceful scene-the larks in the sky, the soft winter sunshine, the vast reaches of brown earth just breaking out into green where the earlier seeds are coming, the white mountain tops beyond thick with their mantle of snow. The frogs are croaking in calm content in the lush grass at the roadside and the linnets are singing like mad.

If you look sharply enough, you may see two men going from point to point about the

ONION SEED SPREAD OUT FOR DRYING

great ranch, baiting gopher traps and collecting their morning catch. The men are at it all the time and so are the gophers! As many as 200 a week are trapped, for the pests increase with disagreeable and discouraging rapidity; they present one of the serious problems of the seed farm.

INFLUENCE OF SEED FARMING ON CHARACTER

In conversation with the superintendent of one of the big warehouses where the seeds are stored pending shipment, as we stood on the cement floor while tier on tier the huge rows of sacks of seeds rose to the high ceiling, the subject of the influence of seed farming upon the workmen came up. It was called

up by noting two cheery-faced Japs who were sewing up the sacks-first an inside sack of heavy duck holding the seed, then a heavy outside sack drawn over the other for protection. The subject was all summed up in this comment by one who had grown gray in the service. A man who likes butchering pigs will not take to cultivating roses. No doubt, many of the aged Chinese have never given up the pipe, and with that strange Oriental persistence and iron conservatism they have gauged their supply of opium to a hair so that it will the very least interfere with longevity; a good many of the Japs have their celebration days, when they go off for a more or less quiet drunk; and very many of both nationalities gamble. But, after all, the warehouse superintendent and the manager of the big ranch believed that the influence of the calling, the work among flowers and growing things, had a marked bearing on the men, making them more gentle. This was eminently true of a lot of French seed-growers whom I once saw at work in a large seed estate hard by the city of Paris, Japs, Chinamen, Americans working in harmony-it must be the flowers!

By the end of February the main work of seeding is over. March, April, May, and sometimes well into June, are cultural months. The weeds find quickly how rich a storehouse is this dark soil, more quickly than their gentler bred relatives. The superintendent of one of the large ranches told me that he plowed