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grows fast and bears in three years. Very nice jelly and marmalade are made from the 
guava grown here. Iam but just beginning to plant bananas; have had a few for several 
years, and fully tested their good qualities, and have now some 2,000 plants, mostly young. 
The winters are rather severe here, but the fruit matures well and bids fair to become the 
most profitable that can be raised in this region. It requires a rich and slightly moist soil, 
gives fruit from the sucker or sprout in 12 to 18 months, and when well attended yields from 
one to five or six bunches on every five feet square, the large bunches frequently selling as 
high as two dollars. 
The most successful manuring thus far tried here, for the banana, corn, cane, &c., is 
animal matter combined with lime and covered with muck, marsh mud, or even soil, to 
absorb the ammonia set free by the lime. The scrapings of a few hides thrown around a 
clump of bananas have excited no little admiration. But the most available manure in this 
region is the fish. I have taken some pains to get the offal from the fisheries, and mixing 
this with lime and covering with muck, have brought out fine corn, sugar cane, cabbage, 
&c., on lands by nature very poor. This should be more generally known. Fish are very 
abundant on the Florida coasts, and should be made more profitable than hitherto. Thus far 
the mullet have been taken late in the season, cured with a large amount of salt, drypacked, 
heads, back bones, scales and all, and in truth neither fit for man nor beast; whereas, taken 
in season, neatly cleaned, and packed in kits, half-barrels, &c., they would be accounted a 
treat on the tables of the better sort. The offal thus left, heads, entrails, and back-bone, 
packed in lime and muck, would pay well at $5 per ton, and at that the poor land along our 
coast become the most productive and profitable in the whole country. I combine lime with 
the offal, to make the manure more permanent as well as to keep it from hogs and buzzards, 
and cover with marsh mud to save the ammonia. A shark is now and then thrown in with 
the offal, and the carcass, after the liver is taken out for the oil, still yields a large amount of 
ammonia. The oil from the fish heads, and sometimes fifteen or twenty gallons from a single 
shark’s liver, will more than pay for fhe expense of taking the fish. 
Dryine Sweet Poratrors.—The extreme difficulty of keeping sweet pota- 
toes in good condition, especially in the markets and storehouses of cities, 
exposed to constant changes of heat and moisture, is fully appreciated by house- 
keepers and dealers in vegetables. The wonderful productiveness of this escu- 
lent in the south, and its great value as a cheap, nutritious, and favorite food of 
all classes, has often suggested the wish that it might be more available as a 
food product. Dr. C. K. Marshall, in the Vicksburg Times of September 4th, 
1867, asked: 
Cannot sweet potatoes, which our soil and climate are so wonderfully adapted to pro- 
duce, be cut up into slices and so dried that they might be made an article of merchandise ? 
Fruits and vegetables have been dried and prepared for shipment, and thus become valuable 
crops. If sweet potatoes can be treated so as to preserve the saccharine matter, and become 
an article of food, even though not as agreeable as the undried root in its best condition, they 
would pay as handsomely as any product of the southern soil. 
This inquiry has been answered by Francis H. Smith, of Baltimore, who has 
dried sweet potatoes successfully in his drying tunnel, which is a chamber of 
lath and plaster twenty feet long and six feet in depth and breadth, with a pecu- 
liar furnace at one end, a chimney of boards at the other, capable of preparing 
twenty-five bushels of dried peaches. Mr. S. makes the fullowing statement of 
his mode of procedure : 
They are pealed by a little machine, and sliced three-eighths of an inch thick by another, 
with great rapidity. When dried, they have lost two-thirds of their weight, weighing twenty 
pounds; are white, and so flinty that the knife makes but little impression; but when 
cooked—steaming is the best—they resume their original appearance, and are in every respect 
equal to the undried root in its best condition. 
Specimens of this dried potato may be seen in the museum of the Agricultu- 
ral Department. It is easily cooked, quite palatable, and if it should become 
popular would prove of great utility and economical and agricultural value. 
FarMING IN CALiForNIA.—The following is an extract from a letter of John 
R. Kennedy, recently of this city, to Commissioner Capron, in which the farm 
of Hon. John Bidwell, the chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture 
in the last Congress, is mentioned : 
You have seen many fine farms, I have no doubt; but, notwithstanding, I think if you 
could see General Bidwell’s farm you would say it surpassed, in everything, any farm that 
it might have been your pleasure to have seen previously. This grand farm contains 
twenty odd thousand acres of the finest land in California, extending as it does from the 
