42 STATE BOARD OF HORTIUULTURE. 



fine citrus quality, we will have oranges that will supplement 

 the Navel with comparative excellence and meet all market 

 demands. 



With the varieties modified and adapted to the best climatic 

 areas to produce the best fruit, and perpetuated in bud and 

 seed by scientific direction to respond to normal productiveness, 

 growth, and longevity, a foundation will be laid to rear a great 

 and glorious State. 



PERIOD OF FRUITFULNESS. 



There seems to be quite prevalent a belief or impression that 

 the period of profitable production of the Washington Navel 

 orange ceases after the seventh or eighth year. 



*"It is not claimed that our trees are short lived, but that 

 their period of fruitfulness is to be short, and that the budded 

 varieties differ materially from the seedling in this regard. 

 But has such a difference been shown to exist in their actual 

 periods of fruitfulness? Let us make a comparison. In the 

 first place the Navel and seedling are both upon the same root, 

 and therefore start out in life upon the same footing. For the 

 first seven or eight years the seedling tree draws upon its plot 

 of ground for such elements of plant-food only as will produce 

 growth of leaf, limb, and root, asking for no fruit-forming 

 material, as it has made no fruit. It then begins to use spar- 

 ingly of its reserve materials, and within the next seven or 

 eight years it will so nearly have exhausted the fruit-forming 

 elements in the natural soil that it no longer produces profit- 

 able crops, thejf being small in quantity and inferior in quality. 

 Now, in the case of the Navel tree, you have taken a bud from 

 a jDrecocious variety of tree, and by uniting it with a seedling 

 root have produced the most ravenous feeder of the citrus 

 family, and also the most perfect machine for making superb 

 fruit yet known to the business. It is not content with the 

 slow, plodding habit of the seedling tree, but even in its second 

 year begins to dig up the necessary materials for constructing 

 fruit, and it will continue to do so in an increased ratio until 

 about the same length of time occupied in the process of the 

 seedling, when it too will have used up so much of its available 



*C. E. Bemis, in essay read at Parmevs' Institute, at Covina, November 

 1899. 



