NOVBMBBE 6, 1919. 



The Florists^ Review 



21 



Establishment, on the Foothills at Sierra Madre, Cal., After Six Years' Work— Right Half. 



require partial shade. Bassett & Wash- 

 burn soon adopted a new style of 

 lath house, consisting of a double roof, 

 the laths running at right angles and 

 the two roofs, one above the other, 

 about nine inches apart. The laths 

 are spaced about four inches apart in 

 each level, so that the light is diffused 

 except for small squares which travel 

 with the sun. The structures have side 

 walls covered with building paper, to 

 serve as windbreaks. 



Commercial Possibilities. 



Bassett & Washburn have built their 

 lath houses in' units of three acres, each 

 unit planned to shelter 100,000 plants. 

 There now are four units in the estab- 

 lishment, housing plants ranging from 

 seedlings to stock 6 years old and 

 thirty-six to forty-eight inches high. 

 As it takes five years to grow plants to 

 the potting stage' and another year to 

 establish tliem in 6-inch pots, the com- 

 pletion of two more 3-acre units of lath 

 houses will put the growers in position 

 to turn out 100,000 finished plants per 

 year. 



The idea is to plant one 3 acre unit 

 each year with 100,000 seedlings out of 

 2%-inch pots, each year to pot up all 

 the 100,000 5-year-old plants in another 

 unit, and to sell out the 100,000 plants 

 in the unit that was potted up the 

 year before. 



Palm growers who have watched the 

 development of the establishment at 

 Sierra Madre have expressed many 

 doubts, some as to the possibility of 

 finding a market for such huge quanti- 

 ties of stock as are now contained in 

 the slat houses, but mostly as to the 

 ability to establish the plants in their 

 pots without bottom heat. For, be it 

 understood, a palm must have a good 

 root action, must have filled its pot 

 with fine, healthy working roots — in a 

 word, it must be established — or it will 

 not give satisfaction to its purchaser. 



The Method Employed. 



Bassett & Washburn sa^ the produc- 

 tion schedule they hope to reach in a 

 year or two will go only a short way 

 toward meeting the demands of the 

 trade and they point to the records of 

 the Federal Horticultural Board, which 

 show annual pre-war imports of many 

 hundreds of thousands of palms. As to 

 their ability to establish the plants with- 

 out bottom heat, they believe they have 

 proved it. Two of the accompanying 



illustrations show plants at the potting 

 stage and after ten months in the pot. 



The seedlings are, when ready, potted 

 into 214-inch pots and are kept there 

 twelve to eighteen months, at which 

 time they have a strong ball of roots 

 and are planted out in the place they 

 are to remain four to five years. AVhen 

 they are dug for potting they nave four 

 or six large tap roots, six to eighteen 

 inches long, too stiff to bend for pot- 

 ting into 6-inch. One of the illustra- 

 tions shows such a plant so dug as to 

 preserve the roots, with the soil washed 



out. The native sons have not thought 

 such a plant could go into a 6-inch pot; 

 they have used 7-inch or 8-inch and 

 produced the overpotted effect most re- 

 tailers are familiar with. Bassett & 

 Washburn root-prune the plants with 

 the spade when digging. They cut the 

 ball of soil and the roots to fit the pot, 

 a 6-inch. In a way, it looks like mur- 

 der, but it proves to be not hurtful. 

 The cutting of the tap roots by a skill- 

 ful man seems to result in increased 

 production of fine, hairlike roots, which, 

 in a year, plunged to the rim in the lath 



Kentia After Ten Months in a 6-inch Pot at Sierra Madre. 



(Insert, enlartred photo of ball with soil washed out to show root action.^ 



