10 



ORANGE CULTURE, 



my husband for cutting off the tops. We succeeded, some time 

 after, in getting a few sweet oranges from New Orleans, and 

 planted the seed, and some of our neighbors did the same ; we 

 also budded a few more sour stumps. But even then, none of us 

 ever dreamed of making a business of raising oranges to sell. 

 We knew so little of the North, and were so shut out from the 

 busy world, that it has only been within the last eight or ten years 

 that our people have really waked up and begun to plant out 

 groves in earnest. " • 



Having thus endeavored to show why this great industry of 

 the future has lain so long in abeyance in a land where all the es- 

 sentials for its pursuit, even to the wild fruit itself, have existed 

 ever since its earliest settlement, we will pass at once to the prac- 

 tical details of orange culture. 



At the very outset the Florida orange grower labors under a 

 disadvantage ; his business is a new one, and consequently, he is, 

 to a considerable extent, dej^endent on a series of experiments. 

 The new comer finds but a limited store-house from which to 

 draw his practical information ; his neighbors have bought and 

 are still buying their own experience, and he must do the same in 

 a great measure, for the points in orange culture on which all 

 growers agree, are very few. How can it be otherwise, with an 

 industry w'hich is only in its infancy ? 



The oldest orange trees in Florida are but babies, a.s it were, . 

 and comparatively few, out of the thousands of groves set out, 

 have even as yet, reached the age of maturity ; it will be many 

 years still, before orange culture will have reached the perfection 

 of a science, as has the culture of the older orchard fruits of the 

 North. 



We are apt, at a distance, to associate poetry and romance 

 with the very name of an orange grove, but when one sets to work 

 in earnest to " make " one for himself, the cold, stern facts, that 

 ever beset the business life of man, come to the surface, and he 

 learns that some money, more time and labor, muscle, patience 

 and pei'severance are necessary, before his embryo grove becomes 

 self-sustaining. 



It is not play to plant and conduct an orange grove from- 



