72 FLORIDA FRUITS ORANGES. 



the trees, and unless this is done with regularity and the 

 alternate trees taken out the effect will not be satisfactory, 

 and the whole symmetry of the grove destroyed, to say 

 nothing of the loss of half the fruit for many years. 



There are two budded groves, not a mile from the writer 

 at this present moment, where ten or twelve years ago 

 little trees were set out fifteen feet apart. To-day, many 

 large bearing trees have had to be removed from one of 

 these, and their profit lost for years to come, while in the 

 other the sun never reaches the ground, and rain, only as 

 it drops from and through the branches that closely inter- 

 lock and dwarf each other. Until the alternate trees in 

 this grove are removed it will never do half as well as if 

 the trees had at first been placed at a proper distance apart. 

 It will not be long before the owner will be compelled to 

 thin oat his trees. 



Another grove, too, we know of, where the wild trees, 

 budded where they stood twelve years ago, are now crowd- 

 ing each other to such an extent that the owners are 

 about to remove a large number, although doing so will 

 entail a loss of several hundred boxes for several years to 

 come. 



Now, these are things that "try men's souls," yet they 

 have to be done sooner or later when the grove is origi- 

 nally set too close; hence the importance of judicious 

 spacing when first planting. There are still a few growers 

 who recommend planting in squares of fifteen or eighteen 

 feet, but many have gone to the other extreme, and advo- 

 cate squares of thirty-five or even forty feet. The great 

 majority, however, have paused half way, and consider 

 from twenty-five to thirty feet the best spacing for the 

 orange or lemon grove, and undoubtedly they are in the 

 right. Such a distance apart gives the trees ample room 

 to spread, and yet wastes neither land nor labor. Where 



