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THE SOUTHERN WORLD, JUNE 15, 1882.
wistfully to Florida’s balmy shore.
The very name of an orange grove is fraught
with interest to thousands, who, beaten, and
tossed about by hard, unremunerative toil,
and chilling storms,—turn instinctively to*
wards the fair land of Florida, as a place of
refuge.
And most truly, "a thing of beauty and a
joy forever,” is an orange grove to its fortu
nate possessor, and in using the word "for
ever” we do so advisably, for no one who
runs a grove at,this present day, will live to
see Us decay, or the failure of jot or tittle of
its usefulness ; rather the contrary.
We remember reading a rather sarcastic
story of some young girls, who to settle a dis
puted point, applied to a maiden lady of
eighty years old, with the question:
“How old must a woman be before she
gives up ail hope of getting married ?”
The old lady (so the story runs) shook her
head, and made reply—
"Girls, you must ask some one older than
I am.” 80 with the orange tree.
At Cordova, that far-famed seat of ancient
Moorish splendor and luxury, there are still
remaining a number of monster orange trees,
known to be seven hundred years old; their
trunks are partly hollow, their bark cracked
and rugged, and yet each year these doughty
old giants yield up theirsevenand ten thous
ands of large,luscious golden balls, as though
yet in the hey-day of their youth; and who
knows; perhaps they are! Certainly, as yet
they show no intention of dying of old age,
nor of retiring on half pay, nor of shirking
the active bus! ness of the! r li ves, and, doubt
less, if one versed in their native tongue
were to say to them—
“How old must an orange tree be before
it ceases to bear?” they would shake their
great, bushy heads and reply,
“You must ask older trees than we are!”
Kven in Englund, at Hampton Court,
where the tree is raised only as a curiosity,
and is carefully sheltered under gloss, there
are several, the register of whose birth bears
dute of over three hundred years ago.
So you see it is no rash assertion, this of
ours, that no orange grove owner will live to
see his trees cease to yield him an income,
and a good one too, if he but treats them
with moderate kindness, unless, indeed, some
extraordinary extraneous cause supervenes
to destroy them, such as fire or flood, which
may be reckoned os among the impossibili
ties.
Before referring in detail to the mode of
culture pursued in Florida, in raising this
justly celebrated fruit, a brief glance at its
oiigin may not be amiss.
An earnest naturalist, Galessio, was the
first to trace its history with any degree of
authenticity, and the result of his careful
researches he published to the world, in his
“ Trails’ du Citrus," issued in Paris, in the
year 1811.
According to tiiis author, the Arabs, pene
trating further into the interior of India
than any foreign nation had done before,
discovered the orange family flourishing
there and held in high esteem by the natives.
From this point the Arabs conveyed the
sweot, now called China oranges, into Persia
and Syria, and the bitter orange, now called
the Seville, found its way into Arabia,
Egypt, the north of Africa, and Spain ; from
these points the orange travelled into other
countries, notably China, and in this latter
Empire it so flourished and spread, far and
wide, that by and by it came to be a fiction
believed in by Europeans, that the orange
was indigenous to China
Galessio shows, however, that the so-called
"China orange” is by no means a spontaneous
production of thatcountry, and his statement
is further corroborated by the absence of
all mention of this fruit, in the exceedingly
minute and circumstantial account given
by the father of modern travellers, Marco
Polo, of the productions of China.
The orange was not known to the ancients,
either in Europe or Syria, and the palm of
its introduction to the world must be ac
corded to the Arabians, whose anxiety for
extension of medical and agricultural knowl
edge, was almost equal to their zeal for the
propagation of the Koran.
Tbs sweet orange which they carried to
Spain spread thence into Portugal, Sicily
St. Michael and the Mediterranean islands!
and the West Indies.
In each and all of these various places has
the difference in climate and soil produced
varieties and changes in the characteristics
of the original common stock, so that in
these days, the Sicily, St. Michael, Maltese,
Havana, and a great number of others are
well known and established varieties of this
noble fruit. To suppose, as many do, that
the orange is a spontaneous production of
the soil of the Hew World, is to make agreat
mistake; only where the early Spanish or
Portuguese landed and penetrated into the
country, is the wild orangepf America to be
found.
On the banks of the Kio Cedeno, in the
midst of a great forest, Humboldt, to his
amazement, came upon a broad belt
of wild orange trees, laden with large,
sweet and most delicious fruit. "Surely
these must then, be indigenous to the soil!”
be thought; but subsequent inquiry led to
the discovery that those grand old trees had
once formed a portion of extensive groves
planted by the Indians from seeds obtained
from their early Spanish visitors and con
querors. And to this same source does
Florida owe her beautiful wild groves; only
here, whether by the accident of soil or seed,
the wild fruit is sour, not sweet.
Ponce de Leon and his successors, but most
of all the unfortunate French colony, bar
barously massacred by cruel Menendez, “not
as Frenchmen, but as Lutherans," were
directly instrumental in introducing into
the “Land of Flowers” the noble fruit that
is rapidly becoming the chief source of
wealth and happiness to its adopted iiome.
Briefly, the orange is not a native but a
naturalized citizen of the United States.
Looking back only a few years, from our
present point of enlightenment, as to the in
estimable value of this once neglected tree,it
is very hard to understand how it is that the
native Floridian did not long ago wake up
to the realization of the wealth within his
grasp, of the golden apple lying neglected at
his feet. And yet there were, it is true,
several causes conducing to perpetuate this
strange blindness; for one thing, Florida,
though it contains within its borders the
oldest city, by forty years, in the United
States, has ever been, owing to a conjunction
of circumstances, one of the least known,
and most sparsely settled of them ail;
owned first by one European power, then by
unother, before finally passing into the
Federated States; torn and distracted by
Indian wars and raids, and lying in a remote
corner of the Union, completely out of the
general line of travel.it is not to be wondered
at that Florida was, except to a very few, a
sealed book. It is true that there were a few
intelligent, wide-awake Southerners who
held the orange at an approximate to its true
value, but these men were content to set out
and cultivate their trees on a comparatively
small scale, and they never penetrated fur
ther into the country than the St. John’s
river, and St. Augustine, where, too often, a
severe frost would injure the tender trees,
and discourage their owners. •
Beyond the points just mentioned, few
settlers were to be found, and those few,
were, almost to a man, of a low and ignorant
class; men who were satisfied to saunter
lazily through their days, existing on "pork
and hominy,” or whatever else was “easy to
grow and take care of itself,” in which cate
gory were included vast herds of cattle,
whichever and anon, they drove to the
nearest sea-port for shipment to the West
Indies. To such as these, the luscious sweet
orange of Europe, so well-known in the
Northern States, was a boon unknown and
undreamed of; they knew, it is true, that,
scattered over the Central and Southern
portions of Florida, were wild groves of
beautiful trees, bearing a large yellow fruit,
but that fruit was exceedingly bitter and
sour, and held by them in no esteem.
It was not until our unhappy civil war had
come to a close, and the ancient regime was
broken up, that a new people began to press
beyond the borders of Florida, bringing in
their midst the commencement of a new era
in its hitherto stagnant civilization.
Even then it was sometime before the at
tention of these new-comers was drawn to
the capabilities of the wild sour orange
groves scattered all around them in the rich
hummock lands, and the first bold pioneer
who ventured to experiment upon their
true yalue, met, as is usual in such cases,
with no encouragement from his neighbors,
but rather determined opposition and ridi
cule
A case, in illustration, was related to the
writer recently by a neighbor, a lady who is
now the proud owner of several fine bearing
groves: Fourteen years ago she removed
with her family from the Northern part of
the State down into the "Great Lake Re
gion," and "Orange Centre;" building a
home in the piney woods for the sake of
health. The want of shade was at once ap
parent ; to supply this desideratum, several
large sour orange trees were transplanted
from a wild grove near by. They flourished
exceedingly well, but their fruit was allowed
to rot upon the ground, uncared for. One
day there came a stranger, who argued so
eloquently upon the great gain to be ob
tained by cutting their tops off, and insert
ing buds from asweet orange in tbeirtrunks,
that, sorely against the will of our inform
ant, her husband proceeded to follow the
stranger’s advice. “I scolded and cried, and
cried and scolded,” she said, “but it was of
no use; the tops of those splendid trees were
sawed off, and the little green sticks the
stranger gave us were put into the bark of
the poor, bare trunks. In a few months,
seeing how fast the buds were growing, I be
gan to think perhaps there was some truth
in the stranger’s words, and in three years,-
when I saw a fine crop of splendid oranges,
the sweetest I had ever tasted, I blessed the
stranger, and thanked my husband for cut
ting off the tops. We succeeded, some time
after, in getting a few sweet oranges from
New Orleans, and planted the seed, and
some of our neighbors did the same; we also
budded a few more sour stumps. But even
then, none of us ever dreamed of makings
regular business of raising oranges to sell.
We knew so little of the North, and were so
shut out from the busy world, that it has
only been within the last eight or ten years
that our people have really waked up and
begun to plant out groves in earnest.”
Having thus endeavored to show why this
great industry of the future has lain so long
in abeyance in a land where all the essen
tials for its pursuit, even to the wild fruit
itself, have existed ever since its earliest
settlement, we will pass at once to the prac
tical details of orange culture.
At the very outset the Florida orange-
grower labors under a disadvantage; his
business is a new one, and, consequently, he
is, to a considerable extent, dependent on a
a series of experiments. The new-comer
finds but a limited store-house from which
to draw his practical information; his neigh
bors have bought and are still buying their
own experience, and he must do the same
in a great measure, for the points in orange
culture on which all growers agree, are very
few. How can it be otherwise, with an in
dustry which is only in its infancy ?
The oldest orange trees in Florida are but
babies, as it were, and comparatively few,
out of the thousands of groves set out, have
even as yet, reached the age of maturity; it
will be many years still, before orange cul
ture will have reached the perfection of a
science, as has the culture of the older
orchard fruits of the North.
Not a few men have come to Florida, full
of the idea of “setting out a grove,” and
reaping a fine fortune; that idea is all well
enough, and quite capable of being realized,
if they go to work the right way. But some
of them planted their trees, and then sat
down with their hands in their pockets,
expecting their trees to take entire care of
themselves, and when they found that, on
the contrary, they required constant atten
tion, if a good growth was desired, like any
other fruit trees—and that time must also be
given them to grow,—then these men be
came disappointed and impatient, and went
back to the North grumbling at Florida and
her groves as “humbugs both.” Others
again, full of energy and determination,
went to the other extreme; studying only
how to make their trees grow the fastest, they
dug and plowed and fertilized, and fertilized
and plowed and dug, and then shrieked
aloud in impatient rage when they beheld
their much-cared-for groves, drooping,
dying, dead I
With a little more attention than the first,
with a little less than the second, gave the
trees, the latter would have flourished and
delighted their owner’s hearts; but the one
class starved their trees, the other surfeited
them, and, as they are living things, why
should they not suffer under such improper
treatment just as a child would do?
At the very start, it becomes a mooted
question whether to set out the trees on
hummock land or on pine. There are plenty
of advocates for each, but as a matter of fact,
the “pine-landers” are every year becoming
more and more in the majority; in one point,
however, both cliques agree, the orange
must have a high, dry position, or it will not
flourish. A case in point lies before the
writer’s eyes at this moment; a fine young
grove, just "coming into profit;" the trees
are large and flourishing, with the exception
of one row on the outer edge, where they
were inadvertently set out on a low piece of
ground; these unfortunates are yellow and
Btunted and barren, and will have to be
moved before they will ever be thrifty as
their sister trees.
Thoroughly dry land, therefore, is an ulti
matum. The advocates of hummock land
claim that it is richer and does not require
manure to start with, as do even the best
pinelands; they grant that it is unhealthy to
live in their midst, especially in the summer
season, and for this reason many of the hum
mock-grove owners live two or three miles
back in the piney woods; further “deponents
say not." But the "pine-landers” have
much more to say on their side ; in the first
place, leaving theunhealthlness of the hum
mocks, and the inconvenience of living so
far from one's grove out of the question, it
costs five or six times as much to clear one
acre of hummock, as it does pine land ; the
former is overgrown with trees, shrubbery
and vines, while the latter is free from un
derbrush and only requires the giant pine
trees to be cut down, leaving a clear piece of
ground for the plow to pass over. The one
clearing costs $50 or more per acre, the lnt-
ter $10, a difference that more than covers
the cost of the extra fertilizers required
when setting out the grove. The difference
in the cost of the two pieces of land is
equally great also, unless one is fortunate
enough to "homestead" hummock land.
Again, after the first few years of orange
bearing has robbed the ground of its riches,
the hummock groves must be manured as
well as the groves of the piney woods, and,
morever, so far as it is possible to judge from
the limited experience at command, the lat
ter, after the lapse of a number of bearing
years, are fonnd to be in better condition
than those of the hummocks,and to continue
so. Again, the dealers are beginning to notice
that the oranges raised on hummock land is
more liable to sweat and decay in transit;
also, it more frequently “bursts” upon the
tree, its skin apparently absorbing more
moisture in the shape of rain, arid then ex
panding in a quickly succeeding sunshine.
It will not, we believe, be many years be
fore all orange growers (except tiiose whose
interests conflict with the acknowledge
ment, Fwill unite in the testimony that good
pine lands are the best for a permanent, pay
ing grove of orange trees.
Belling Oats.
In view of the extraordinary yield of the
oats in Georgia, and perhaps other States,
this season, it is made a serious question
with some farmers what to do with them.
We are informed that some are contracting
to sell their surplus at very low rates—even
so low as thirty cents per bushel. To such
as are afraid that the 8outh has made so
many oats that they cannot be consumed,
we wish to venture a few suggestions. In the
first place, we doubt if the State of Georgia
will harvest more than eight million bushels
of oats this season—an amount sufllcient to
feed her 240,000 horses and mules only about
100 days, if fed to them at the rate of one-
third of a bushel per day. But ten per
cent of the crop will be required for seed
next fall; so that the period will be reduced
to 90 days, or three months. Now suppose
a drouth occurs this summer and cuts short
the yield of the growing crop of corn. Even
If an average corn crop be assured, it will
require all the oats made to carry us through
until the next year’s harvest; while if the
stock^ood* 1 t ' 6re wiU be a deflc 'ency of
After all the glorifications over the oat
crop, (and we throw our cap as high as any),
there are thousands of farmers in the South
who have not made a single bushel, (because
they sowed no oats,) and many others who
sowed only a few acres and have none to
spare and will have com to buy.
Under such circumstances it would be
folly for a farmer to sacrifice his surplus
oats. It would be far better to feed them to
stock and sell them in the form of beef,
pork, butter, etc. Indeed this is the better
policy as a general rule. Where a farmer
has corn on hand he should feed nothing
but oats to his work stock and use the corn
to force forward the pigs and other fattening
animals. Asa food for general purposes oats
are worth about two-thirds as much as corn,
by measure. In other words if a bushel of
com is worth one dollar, a bushel of oats is
worth sixty-six cents. So it is easy to see
that oats cannot be sold at less than sixty-
six cents per bushel without loss, while
feeding stock on corn that will bring one
dollar per bushel. A t the. present and pros
pective high prices of bacon and pork and
beef, it behooves every farmer to feed lib
erally, yet judiciously, every animal that
can be made to produce pork, beef and but
ter. It is rarely good policy to sell grain of
any kind off the farm, if stock are on hand
or can be bought to whom it may be fed.
It is just at this point that our system of
farming is defective, in that we do not keep
stock enough. The most profitable farming
is generally found where the greatest atten
tion is given to stockfeeding, converting the
raw material of grain and hay crops into
flesh, milk and butter and wool, 5,