CHAPTER III. 



Propagation of date-plants from seeds and suckers (off-shoots) ; 

 care of young plantations ; manuring, interculture, pruning 

 and water requirements of established plantations. 



27. If 100 seeds are sown, 50 or more of the seedling 

 Propagation by plants will probably be male trees and will of 

 course bear no fruits. If 50 females are got, 

 perhaps ten trees or fewer will yield passable fruits, five or six 

 of these will probably yield fruits of a quality equal to that 

 of the mother tree, and one or more, usually not even one, 

 may yield fruits superior to her. The characters of the male 

 and female palms used to produce the seeds will of course 

 materially affect the number of useful seedlings got. (See 

 page 95, para. 62.) The sexes cannot be known with certainty 

 till the trees bear flowers (see also page 14, para. 11), and as 

 this will occur five to ten years after the seeds are sown, land, 

 labour, and water will have to be provided for 100 trees for 

 from five to ten years before the 90 more or less useless trees 

 can be weeded out and the ten or fewer passable ones can be 

 selected. 



The reason that so few good female trees are got from 

 ordinary seeds is that the female trees are generally pollinated 

 by male trees of inferior quality, and they of course influence 

 the offspring. As the female date trees are almost always pro- 

 pagated by off-shoots in date-growing countries and the edible 

 part of the fruit formed as the immediate result of pollination 

 is not affected by the character of the male used (see page 95, 

 para. 62), date-growers have ordinarily no incentive to breed 

 good male trees. If good males were bred, much better results 

 from female seedlings would be got. 



