36 



THE AGRICULTURAL NEWS. 



February 1, 1913. 



FRUITS AND FRUIT TREES. 



SUCCESS IN BUDDING CACAO IN 

 DOMINICA. 



Two articles ibat have appeared recently in the Agri- 

 cultuntl Adi.'soi November 9, 1912. and January 4, 1913, 

 have signalized the successful budding of the mango and the 

 avocado pear, respectively- the former by Messrs. I5rooks 

 and Xiles, in St. Lucia, and the latter by Mr. J. .Jones, in 

 I)oniinica. Previous to the appearance of the.=e articles, 

 Baiiiely on September 9, 1912, Mr. Jones sent to the Head 

 Office of this Department a description, accompanied by 

 photographs, showing that he had been succe.ssful in propa- 

 gating cacao by budding, in bamboo joints. Blocks for the 

 reproduction of the photographs have been obtained, and 

 now that these are available they are used for iilustrating 

 this article, on the next page. 



The great importance of the budding of cacao is that it 

 provides a much handier and more speedy method than 

 inarching for the propagation of the plant, and enables 

 a large number of plants of exactly the same kind to be 

 raised quickly. The eagerness with which the discovery of 

 a successful way of doing the work has been awaited is 

 illustrated by the following e-xtracts from papers by practical 

 agriculturists and others interested in the subject. 



The first is from a paper by Mr. Jones, entitled Grafted 

 Cacao at the Dominica IJotanie Station, appearing in the 

 Wefl Indian /lull' tin, A'ol. XII, No. 1, p. SI, issued January 

 !•'), 1912; it is as follows (p. 87):— 



.... 'It is hoped, however, by those who wish to see 

 the cacao industry placed on a firm basis, that t!ie feasibility 

 of budding cacao as easily and certainly as this can be done 

 for citrus fruits will be attained eventually, for the following 

 reasons. 



'Grafting by approach entails a certain amount of 

 additional labour and inconvenience, for the stocks have to 

 be brought near to the selected trees, stages have to be 

 erecttd around the trees for the accommodation of the stocks, 

 and the plants after inarching require daily watering and 

 attention for a period of five to eight weeks, according to the 

 time of the year in which the work is being carried out. In 

 addition, the grafted plants must be kept in a nursery for 



several weeks, after severance from the parent trees, before 

 they may be planted in the fields. In drawing attention 

 to these ditTicullies, ii is not intended to discourage the 

 adoplion of this nieth'-d of propagating cacao; for even with 

 their existence, grafting by ai)proach is well worthy of 

 adoption. If, however, a way is found of budding cacao stocks 

 from nine to twelve montts old, growing in bamboo pots in 

 nurseries, the operations connected wilh propagation would 

 be simplified, the speed of work would be greater and the 

 latter could be centralized and therefore more easily carried 

 on. Another consideration in favour of budding is that a tree 

 capable of yielding several hundred shoots for inarching 

 during a season would give, in the same time, thousands of 

 buds; hence the possession of a means of budding cacao would 

 render tlie [iropagation of a given variety much more speedy 

 than is at present pi ssible with inarching.' 



The second extract is taken from a paper by Dr. A. 

 Fredholm, entitled the Practice of Renewal by Chupons, oa 

 p. 371 of the issue for last Xoveniber of the Pnjceedint/s of 



the Aiiriciilturnl Snciilii of I'liiiiifnd mid Tulmyo: — 



'It may be argued that, as yet, no practical method of 

 grafting or budding the cacao tree has been discovereil. The 

 only method which, so far. has proved successful has been 

 inarching This method is both cumbrous and expensive but, 

 even then, I am convinced that it would pay. So little work 

 has, however, been done on artificial vegetative propagation 

 of this plant, that it would be a serious error to condemn 

 a mode of propagation, which has given such uniformly good 

 results with other plants. .\s yet, we can only be said to 

 have proved the cacao tree amenable to vegetative production 

 artificially produced. This in itself is a valuable discovery, 

 and all that is now --equired is to inaugurate experiments and 

 continue them until the right method from an economic point 

 of view is discovered. I'ersonally, I have not the slightest 

 doubt, that experiments properly conducted by a man experi- 

 enced in this kind of work would very soon lead to the 

 desired result. So many and varied are the purely mechani- 

 cal features of the practices of budding and grafting, that 

 very few, indeed, are the plants to which suitable modes of 

 applying either of the.se practices have not after a time been 

 found. Many plants, which for long gave uniformly negative 

 results, are now regularly propagated by these methods to 

 great economic advantage.' 



