64 FLORIDA FRUITS ORANGES. 



the fight and suffer a financial shipwreck. In short, as a 

 well-known orange grower emphatically asserts : 



"It is universally recognized that budding shortens the 

 period before fruiting. Is not this, then, a strong reason 

 financially why we should adopt the budded system ? My 

 own experience teaches me the necessity of budding. I 

 can see no dwarfing tendency or results ; on the contrary, 

 my budded trees are larger than seedlings of the same age, 

 and the fruit is certainly as good. I have not been able to 

 see that the production is fewer in numbers. I therefore 

 give my unqualified opinion that it will not only pay to 

 bud the orange tree, but that as intelligent men we can not 

 afford to do otherwise." 



There is also another strong argument in favor of budded 

 trees that w r e have not yet touched on. Years of experi- 

 ence have taught every horticulturist that the attempt to 

 produce certain varieties of fruit from seed almost invari- 

 ably results in failure. The seed either produces an infe- 

 rior fruit or an entirely new variety, which is likely to 

 be poorer rather than better than that which produced 

 the seed, and before any result can be attained years of 

 care and waiting must elapse. Every grower who has 

 carefully observed the fruit produced by the various trees 

 in a seedling grove can not have failed to notice a great 

 difference therein. Let the seeds that produced these trees 

 be ever so carefully selected, some of the trees will pro- 

 duce better oranges than others with the same care and 

 treatment. 



Now this is not the case with budded trees. From the 

 moment the first tiny little leaf starts out, the germ of the 

 future tree, its destined work is marked out and known. 

 If a bud from a bearing Mediterranean Sweet, Navel, 

 Homosassa, or Mandarin is used, then we know what the 

 budded tree will bear, and thus we not only secure beyond 



