RISE AND PROGRESS OF ORANGE CULTURE. 15 



blessed the stranger, and thanked my husband for cutting 

 off the tops. We succeeded, some time after, in getting a 

 few sweet oranges from New Orleans, and planted the seed, 

 and some of our neighbors did the same ; we also budded 

 a few more sour stumps. But even then none of us' ever 

 dreamed of making a business of raising oranges to sell. 

 We knew so little of the North, and were so shut out from 

 the busy world, that it has only been within the last eight 

 or ten years that our people have really waked up and 

 begun to plant out groves in earnest." 



Having thus endeavored to show why this great industry 

 of the future has lain so long in abeyance in a land where 

 all the essentials of its pursuit, even to the wild fruit itself, 

 have existed ever since its earliest settlement, we will pass 

 at once to the practical details of orange culture. 



At the very outset the Florida orange grower labors 

 under a disadvantage ; his business is a new one, and con- 

 sequently he is, to a considerable extent, dependent on a 

 series of experiments. The new-comer finds but a limited 

 store-house from which to draw his practical information ; 

 his neighbors have bought and are still buying their own 

 experience, and he must do the same in a great measure, 

 for the points in orange culture on which all growers agree 

 are very few. How can it be otherwise with an industry 

 which is only in its infancy ? 



The oldest orange trees in Florida are but babies, as 

 it were, and comparatively few, out of the thousands of 

 groves set out, have even as yet reached the age of matu- 

 rity ; it will be many years still before orange culture will 

 have reached the perfection of a science, as has the culture 

 of the older orchard fruits of the North. 



We are apt, at a distance, to associate poetry and ro- 

 mance with the very name of an orange grove, but when 

 one sets to work in earnest to " make" one for himself, the 



