74 
FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
After a certain amount of these slowly 
available materials have been added to 
the soil, some plant food is being rendered 
available all the time, and as the roots 
are there ready to utilize it—perhaps al¬ 
most as rapidly as it becomes available— 
not so mudi is lost by seepage to the soil 
waters below. It seems to me, too, that 
this might apply to the fertilization of 
orange trees. 
(5) By shading. 
Shading undoubtedly conserves soil 
moisture, and if we can retain the soil 
moisture near the surface, it not only 
means more water for the plant, but it 
also means more water, and with it more 
plant food, brought up from the deep sub¬ 
soil by capillary action. 
In the light of the evidence before us 
I am strongly inclined to the belief that 
it would be economy to fertilize pineap¬ 
ples from four to six, instead of two to 
three times a year. I am aware that this 
is not in accord with recommendations 
made in the recent bulletin on fertilizer 
experiments with pineapples, but at the 
time those recommendations were made 
we had not discovered that the loss of 
plant food on pineapple soils was so great 
If you should give to your horse at 
one time, food enough to last him one 
week, you would expect much of it to be 
wasted; so, if you give to your pineapples 
at one time, plant food enough to sustain 
them six months, and there is nothing in 
the soil to bind or absorb this plant food, 
so that it may be given out again gradu¬ 
ally, there must necessarily be much loss. 
At present I know of no experimental 
evidence on which to base such a state¬ 
ment, but reasoning along the lines indi¬ 
cated, I am of the opinion that 2000 
pounds of fertilizer applied at intervals 
of tw'o or three months would be as ef¬ 
fective as 3500 pounds of the same 
material in two applications. 
There is, however, the difficulty that 
the extra expense of frequent applications 
might outweigh the cost of the extra fer¬ 
tilizer required in the case of two applica¬ 
tions. This of course could be determin¬ 
ed by experiment, and as the Chairman of 
the Committee on Fertilizers and Irriga¬ 
tion points out in his paper, it would no 
doubt be a profitable field for investiga¬ 
tion along other lines than pineapple 
growing. 
SOME NOTES ON THE PINEAPPLE EXPERIMENT 
AT JENSEN^ 
BY A. W. BLAIR. 
Mr. Presidentj Ladies and Gentlemen: 
A bulletin giving full account of this 
experiment up to and including the crop 
for last year has recently been published 
by the Experiment Station, and will very 
soon be distributed, but I trust that I may 
not be out of place here, if I sketch briefly 
the object and plan of the experiment, 
mention some of the more important re¬ 
sults obtained, and perhaps raise some 
questions which it may be profitable for 
pineapple growers and others to consider.. 
