2304. The Illness.—I may say that I was sent down by the Talbot Agricultural Society to give evidence before the Commission. I have been 30 years growing fruits of different kinds, more especially the English kinds, and for twenty years I have been irrigating, and spent £300 twenty years ago to irrigate 5 acres of garden grounds, and that was the best £300 I ever spent in my life. I can assure you that I could not have possibly brought up a large family as I did bring up for ten years upon the garden after I got the irrigation dam, and I was able to do it respectably with irrigation. I am quite certain I could not have done on 5 acres of ground without. In reference to fruits, I find all fruits nearly suit us that suit temperate regions. The raspberry, the strawberry, without irrigation, were failures. With irrigation we could always ensure a crop even from the poorest land. Some years were larger than others, but a crop was always certain. With the other fruits— page 132 apples—I find two or three soakings a year an immense benefit to them. I found without it one-half to two-thirds of the crop tumbled off. It was a light sandy soil with a clayey bottom; but with irrigation I found it nailed the fruit on to the trees, as I phrased it to my friends. I found that the peach and apricot, it was a great improvement to them—the peach. Of course I suffer the same as the rest—not from the denuding of the country from forest timber immediately around it, because the forest timber still exists immediately around the orchard, it being my own property; but I find that the peach dies from the root upwards, and only the top of the branch buds still. I have peach trees in my ground now 25 years old. I had cherry trees that when I started to irrigate were dying out. I then spent £160 in cutting a race from what is known as Stewart's dam, which is now the Council of Talbot's water supply for a time, and I saved those trees. The cherries were dying from the tops downwards at only ten years old. Some of those trees are still in the garden, but they are not in a flourishing state now. They are old and decrepid—one side perhaps vigorous and the other dying down. I have tried small quantities of lucern, and mangolds, and sorghum, saccharatum, and Indian corn. I find the whole of them are easily cultivated, not for grain but for cattle fodder, with irrigation. Without irrigation I found them a perfect failure. I put in a small patch almost the first year, I suppose about 28 years ago. I put it on the drill system of husbandry, and I found that lucern did very well, and found the food even without irrigation on that flat piece of land—a low flat. I got food for cattle when other food was very scarce. But it required cutting, not feeding off. When I erected the dams I tried irrigation upon it, and the effect was most marvellous, five or six crops cut in the summer time, and each crop as good as the ordinary spring crop of lucern. I thought my example would be followed by my neighbours and people round about, but I found that British people are not a copying people. I found with sowing lucern broadcast with a com crop it was a perfect failure. There was no cleaning the lucern, and in a few years the lucern died out. My experience shows me that, if you want to cultivate lucern, cultivate it in drills worked with a horse-hoe between it every year, then it is likely to last.

2311. The quantity was so great?—The quantity was Edward Cox, so great; it was offered to them. And, at present, I was talking to their manager the day before yesterday, and he tells me the difficulty is to find a market for canned fruit.

The lucern is a most wonderful plant; its marvels are not appreciated till you put water upon it, and then it springs like magic at the time grass is white and bare and dried up.