FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 
and cultivate it, and carry other trees 
of it to another part of the world, and 
cultivate it there, and if you bring to¬ 
gether fruits from the two regions for 
comparison you will probably find them 
slightly different. 
Question 9. Is it harmful to bury 
dropped oranges in orange groves, leav¬ 
ing out the consideration of fungi? 
Mr. Hume: I would not think there 
would be any danger in burying them if 
there were no fungi on them, if too 
large numbers were not put in any one 
place. 
Mr. Hollingsworth : Last year we had 
some experience on that line, by taking 
out the seeds from oranges in large quan¬ 
tities, at a cool, shady spot. We dumped 
the refuse right there and it acted as a 
fertilizer and the results have been good. 
Question 10. What is the success of 
pecans budded or grafted on the scrub 
hickory ? 
Mr. Hume: I may say, in a general 
way, that the budding of pecans on any 
kind of hickory has not been very suc¬ 
cessful. If I were advising anybody to 
plant pecan trees, I would advise them 
to plant trees grown on pecan (roots. 
Trees can be top worked on hickory, but 
the results are not satisfactory. 
Mr. Barber: I know two patches, one 
in Jacksonville and one in Suwannee 
County where the pecans were budded to 
the hickory and both lots were, you might 
say, a complete failure. There are a few 
trees left, but they are almost worthless. 
Mr. Gaitskill: I have some trees ten 
years old or over. They have borne a 
few nuts. I could not ask for a more 
beautiful tree, so far as the tree itself is 
193 
concerned, but they bear no nuts worth 
speaking of. 
Question ii. Does close planting 
cause heavy fruiting in oranges. How 
is 30x21 feet on high pine land for 
oranges ? 
Mr. Robinson: We have had very 
little experience with oranges; our experi¬ 
ence is almost entirely with grapefruit. 
With the oranges we noted no special ef¬ 
fect either for heavy bearing or light 
bearing. 
Mr. Hart: In Jaffa they plant their 
trees about four and six feet apart; I 
guess six feet is a good ways apart. You 
can almost reach to the top of the trees, 
and yet a grove of that kind is almost 
a solid mass of oranges. When they get 
too large they cut out every other one or 
cut it back so as to give a little more room 
for the alternate trees. I have seen no 
trees there that grow up as big as ours 
do, but they certainly have a heavy crop 
of fruit. 
Question 12. What is the function 
of a tap root of an orange tree ? Does it 
go to water? Then what does it do? 
Mr. Street: In ’95, I dug up some 
orange trees that seemed to be no good,, 
and I hunted for the tap root as far as; 
I could go. I never could find where it 
ended. They were all decayed. 
Mr. Hume: I think it is quite gen¬ 
eral that when trees grow old, the tap 
root disappears. I am speaking, of 
course, of trees in general. 
Mr. Temple: You would not think so 
if you had to use a Hercules stump pull¬ 
er to get the pine trees off your land, 
where the tap root seems to be about 
twice as big around as the tree, and be- 
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