What the Experiment Station is Doing for the 
Fruit and Vegetable Grower. 
By P. H. Rolfs. 
Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: 
I wish to give a somewhat general talk, 
similar to the one I delivered to the So¬ 
ciety at the Tampa meeting. All know 
more or less about the experiment station; 
yet I suppose those of us who are at the 
experiment station think we know less 
about it than many people in the State ap¬ 
pear to know about it. That is quite in 
keeping with the general order of things; 
the nearer one gets to the real thing, the 
less he finds he knows about it. I be¬ 
lieve our worthy secretary said, a couple 
of years ago, that at one time he knew 
all about fertilizers, but now he found 
that he was just beyond the beginning 
point. In fact, his knowledge had in¬ 
creased until he was in the position of 
knowing just how little he did know. 
We have published from the experi¬ 
ment station 98 bulletins, 117 press bul¬ 
letins, and 20 annual reports. Of the bul¬ 
letins it will be found that over 50 per 
cent, deal directly or indirectly with hor¬ 
ticultural subjects. During the past fiscal 
year the experiment station has distrib¬ 
uted over 73,000 copies of bulletins, press 
bulletins and reports. In addition to 
this a very large amount of time is de¬ 
voted to answering special inquiries made 
by various people in the State. 
FERTILIZER EXPERIMENTS. 
In the matter of making field experi¬ 
ments it is a recognized impossibility to 
grow all crops of the State at the central 
station, consequently the workers must 
proceed to the fields where these crops 
are grown. And to make these experi¬ 
ments of general value it is necessary to 
carry them on under conditions which 
exist in the field. 
PINEAPPLES. 
We have conducted for the past eight 
years experiments in fertilizing certain 
plots continuously with certain definitely 
known fertilizers. As the result of this 
work four bulletins and one separate from 
the annual report have been published. 
We have now ready for publication an¬ 
other bulletin on the chemical analyses of 
the fruits grown on the various plots. 
This work we believe has been carried 
on as long as it will be profitable under 
our present scheme of fertilization. 
CITRUS. 
About a year ago Professor Blair took 
up the question of arranging for carrying 
on a co-operative experiment in citrus 
fertilization. This is being done in co¬ 
operation with Mr. G. M. Wakelin, of 
