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2 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,