FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
127 
this assembly of progressive farmers and 
fruit growers today. 
Had I been called on twelve or fifteen 
years ago to write this article, I would 
have given vastly more information on 
the art of fertilizing than I can today, 
at least I thought so. If you want to 
know just how to fertilize an orange 
grove for any purpose under the sun, al¬ 
ways go to some novice, some one that 
has not been in the business more than 
five or six years, and you can generally 
find out just what you have been striving 
for all these years to learn; rank ignor¬ 
ance on your part. But in a few years 
go to this same person and broach the 
subject, and he is mute as a clam. 
Squanto and the Pilgrim Fathers would 
be outclassed by him for a lack of exact 
information, and yet he is learning. 
I very much doubt if we could, find half 
a dozen in this house who could agree 
as to the exact way to' treat a grove for 
the best results; some would stand out 
for a clean culture the year round, and 
others seem to think to get best results 
from your grove and from the commer¬ 
cial fertilizer applied there is nothing 
like Humus. Humus is a term we under¬ 
stand for all decaying vegetable matter in 
the soil; to my way of reasoning it is the 
storehouse of Nitrogen, one of the most 
expensive and most necessary of all plant 
foods. It contains the food upon which 
the soil organisms live, whose function is 
to convert organic nitrogen into nitrates 
in order to be available for the use of 
plants. It even assists in decomposing 
the mineral constituents of the soil, thus 
making them available for plant food. It 
serves to increase the drouth-resisting 
power of sandy soils; it also conserves 
the fertilizer we apply to the soil and 
holds them within reach of plant life to 
feed in; so I can't help but think that 
Humus is especially needful to our high 
pine lands. You all know the history 
of the grove of Dudley W. Adams, how 
he took an old worn-out farm and by the 
use of all kinds of vegetable matter 
changed the soil from a barren waste to 
one of the most prolific tracts of land in 
that vicinity. 
Of course, he added Phosphoric Acid 
and Potash. Of the many ingredients 
that enter into plant life, from carbon to 
iron, none of them are so vital to the 
average fruit grower as Nitrogen, Phos¬ 
phoric Acid and Potash. I wish our 
experiment stations would go to work 
and analyze a box of oranges, for instance 
grown on the average sandy soil in Flor¬ 
ida, and let us know in plain English just 
how many pounds of Nitrogen, Phos¬ 
phoric Acid and Potash that box con¬ 
tains; give it to us in plain figures in the 
pounds and ounces, so those not versed 
in chemistry may understand at a glance 
just what that box contains. Don’t carry 
out the analysis in the hundredths and 
thousandths of parts, but just say a box 
contains so many pounds or so many 
ounces of each ingredient, without any 
technicalities attached to it at all; then 
send this broadcast over the state, and a 
long step will be made in the art of citrus 
culture. I well remember when I was in 
the West, engaged more or less in the 
mining business. I used to analyze the 
different samples of rock for myself and 
others. Now, it would have been useless 
for me to have given an analysis as a 
rule of a sample of rock in the technical 
terms that I used in the office. 
What they wanted to know and paid 
for was to find out just how much of the 
valuable minerals the rock contained, and 
wanted that in dollars and cents, or in 
