Citrus Fruit Quality 
A. H. Brown, Manatee 
Your president has asked me to give 
you something bearing on production of 
quality in citrus fruit. This is a subject 
that I think falls more in line with scien¬ 
tific research and not for the lavman. 
However, it might seem best not to depend 
entirely on the scientist and we can at 
least give the society the benefit of our 
observations along these lines. 
There are at least four features of the 
business that must have more or less bear¬ 
ing on the subject in question. 
soil 
The soil feature is one of the most im¬ 
portant. 
We think, in our section of the State, 
that we can raise a heavier and thinner 
skinned fruit on our low to medium low 
hammocks than can be raised on the 
higher sandy soils of other sections of the 
State. We cannot, however, raise the fine 
appearing fruit that is raised in the Indian 
river section on a soil that is more or less 
of a shell formation. Even in our own 
section of the State we raise, on a very 
light sandy soil, a fruit that has much the 
appearance of the Indian river fruit, but 
this same fruit is thicker skinned and is 
lacking in the quality, which we might 
designate “character,” that is found in 
this hammock land fruit. 
In past seasons we have covered, in our 
shipments to the markets of the country, 
the larger cities from Boston to Denver. 
This, of course, has included New York. 
Our experience has been, in the case of 
New York, that if we have not something 
that is very attractive in appearance you 
would better stay away from that mar¬ 
ket. While it is a discriminating market, 
it discriminates in favor of appearance 
rather than quality. Boston, on the other 
hand, has paid us good money for quality 
at a time when most of the growers of the 
State were holding back shipments be¬ 
cause they could not see their way clear to 
pick and pack their fruit and be at all sure 
of getting their fixed charges out of their 
shipments. 
FERTILIZER 
Fertilizer used has a very important 
bearing on the quality of the fruit. Dur¬ 
ing the war, and for some time afterward, 
potash was very high and the grower hesi¬ 
tated to pay the price of a grade of goods 
containing 7%, or more, of potash, and 
I think the quality of the fruit declined 
and it is now only getting back to where it 
was before the war. Personally, in the 
fertilizers used in the groves in which I 
have been interested for more than 20 
years, we kept up our content of potash 
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