The Co-ordination of Citrus Grove Practices 
Lindley Heimberger, Lakeland 
The up-to-the-minute citrus fruit grow¬ 
er of today in Florida is vastly a different 
mortal as compared to his forebear of 
even twenty-five years ago; guess-work 
has been reduced to an absolute minimum 
and modern citriculture has been raised 
to the plane of almost an exact science. 
In the building up and in the proper 
maintenance of a profitable commercial 
citrus grove we have a number of funda¬ 
mental factors that must be given very 
careful consideration, which may be 
grouped under the following heads : Prob¬ 
lems of fertilizing, cultivation, spraying 
and pruning, and it is only by the intelli¬ 
gent and proper co-ordination of these 
basal factors that full commercial success 
can be expected in Florida citriculture. 
Using a decimal scale of one hundred 
points in gauging the relative importance 
of the above mentioned members in an 
arch representing the successful growing 
of citrus fruits in our State, we will have 
to grant not less than fifty of the one hun¬ 
dred points total to the fertilising prob¬ 
lems which is the keystone of this arch 
and divide the remaining fifty points be¬ 
tween the other three members, about as 
follows: Thirty points to the right hand 
footing member of the arch, cultivation 
problems; fifteen points to the left hand 
footing member, spraying problems, and 
ii| 
the five points still remaining to the 
fourth fundamental member of this arch, 
i. e., pruning problems. 
FERTILIZING PROBLEMS 
The main reason why I give such great 
stress to fertilizing in the proper care of 
the grove is the fact which must be con¬ 
ceded by all experienced growers in our 
State, that it is a physical and chemical 
impossibility to make practically any kind 
of a commercial grove on the average 
Florida citrus soil without the use of arti¬ 
ficial plant food in some form, no matter 
how well and intelligently the grower cul¬ 
tivates, sprays and prunes his grove. 
In fertilizing we must constantly ob¬ 
serve certain plant physiological princi¬ 
ples, especially the facts that we must use 
complete fertilizers showing proper bal¬ 
ance of essential elements of plant food 
and that this plant food should be in read¬ 
ily available and soluble form, this latter 
applying to the phosphoric acid content as 
well as to the nitrogen and potash constit¬ 
uents. Be liberal and generous in the 
feeding of the trees; time the distributions 
so that there will not be starved tree con¬ 
ditions occurring in the distribution inter¬ 
vals and distribute your fertilizers widely 
and as far away from the tree as the root 
system justifies. 
