The daily morning journal and courier., 1906-10-13
THE LEMON SUPPLY.
Where it Comes From-How the Valu-
 able Essence is Obtained.

Where it Comes From-How the Valu-
 able Essence is Obtained.
 Lemons have become quite a domes- tic question" The housewife is dis covering that lemons are scarce and dear. The explanation of the shortage is q simple one. This has been a Ter cord summer for the use of lemons, and the supply has not equalled the de- mand; prices have gone up and the end of the summer finds a great inroad made into the autumn stock.
 Our lemon supplies are mostly guar anteed by Scilian summers says the London Daily Mail The Messina and Palerma crops begin in November and sometimes last through the whole year, so that the same ship may bring the 1 last cases of the old crop and the first of the new. But this has been lemon summer, and so the last shipments from Sicily did not provide more than 1 enough 10 meet the August heat wave. Next to Sicily we depend upon Naples and the Neapolitan crop, which begins in the early spring, usually lasts until October but this year, again, Neapoli- | tan lemons have lasted only until the beginning of September. Then comes sunny Spain with Malaga, Murcia and Carthagena lemons, and the groves of Lisbon practically complete the tale of our supplies.
 California has. during the last thirty years, supplied some portion of the American demand, but the United
 States is not independent of the lemon
 groves of Europe, and it is the largest
 consumer of European lemons, With
 Great Britain a good second.
 The confectioners take their share,
 though most of their supplies come in the form of pickled rinds and citrate
 of lime. The Messina lemons, having the most acidity. are the best for the purposes of the manufacture of citrate , of lime. and it is in Messina that the < lemons whose products are wanted by
 the confectioners are dealt with, a The pulp is there turned into pow.
 dered citrate of lime, as it is more con , venient to export than the concentra ted lemon juice from which the manu \ facturers here derive their citrate O s lime; and the rinds are put in brin a and sent over to England to be turnet into that adjunct to Christmas cheer r candled peel
 The essence of lemon Is squeezed ou of the peel by hand Sicilian girl Istand with a pile of peel, cut into quar ters at their side and before them is sponge. That is all their apparatus
 They squeeze each quarter of the rin il and a jet of essence issues forth and - soaked up by the sponge. Then tn ]. sponge is squeezed and the costly es 2 sence is bottled, but thousands of len ,- ons are necessary to fill tiny vial. if The lemon tree is a frail plant an a not so hardy as the orange. It is II used to the genial kindness of the su q that nip of frost is fatal to 1t. Or IS hour of rfost on January 30 last yea if almost destroyed the Neapolitan cro if land though many of the trees recoN ,e cred enough strength to put Tort
 fresh leaves this year, they had not tf m strength to bear fruit, but by havln ,d Irested they will be all the better ne'
 year. so that the crop of 1907 may
 expected to reach high level
 abundance and quality Lastyear, to
 the fragrant lemon groves of Il rv French Riviera were "untimely nippt
 f tn bud" The valleys showed u w black and leafless skeletons of tre r's that should have been in leaf and blc