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THE MANATEE.

E ALL know something about St. Augustine, and have admired its Ponce de Leon" hotel, its Alcazar, and the charming dames and damsels who hie them there from the wintry blasts of Washington, New York, and farther north; we are not unfamiliar with Palm Beach; and who has not received pamphlet after pamphlet, each describing, in a little more flowery language than did the last, the wonderful advantages of an immediate investment in the Miami district? To the average man there is nothing but the east coast to Florida. Had it not been for our recent war, the consequent camps at Tampa, and the departure of the transports from that port, it might have been necessary to preface these remarks with the statement that Florida really does have a west coast, a region as different in climate, soil, and other conditions as if it were a thousand instead of barely one hundred and thirty miles from the Atlantic. Our fruit-buyers and commission men, however, know this region well, particularly the fertile Manatee district, whence they get their finest oranges and the earliest of the "truck "-gardeners' products, and there may we well tarry for two or three pages.

Half a century or so ago great sugar plantations flourished there and planters waxed fat and merry; some of the old concrete mansions yet giving faded evidences that those old-timers knew how to live and enjoy life. The Seminole war drove many away and the generation has died out; besides which politics has "raised hob" with sugar. The people now there are new to the country and mostly hustling Northerners. To a degree it is this thrift added to the wonderful fertility of the soil that produces the astonishing results to be

noted in citrus fruits, vegetables, and everything else that is planted there.

North of the Manatee River (named after a sluggish, ungainly, porpoise-like, aquatic, herbivorous mammal now almost extinct, but that used much to affect these peaceful waters before steamboats, hunters, and other irritants came to disturb its quiet) virtually a salty inlet of the bay, some twelve miles long and a mile wide, into which a main stream and many branches flow- the soil is muck land, original jungle, whose centuries of tropical growths have added their rich fertilization, and it is here that thrive the lettuce, celery, peas, beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, egg-plant, and melons that, in the order mentioned, find their way to our Northern tables long before there is the tiniest shoot of green stuff in our own fields.

It is varied farming indeed, and there is but little time for loafing if the farmer really and not merely figuratively wishes to "make hay while the sun shines." For instance, lettuce seedlings are prepared in August and are set out in October, the product being gathered for the holiday market some twenty thousand plants to the acre. The field is turned up again and seeded to corn, between whose rows are set the tomato plants, both crops maturing early in April; then the field is set to sweet potatoes or to grass, either of which is ready for storing before the rainy season of July and August, when, by the way, it does not rain in one steady downpour, as is generally the case in the tropics, but when there are numerous thunder-storms with their attending showers, and with days and days of brightest sunshine between storms. Some fertilizing is done, of course, but it seems as if vegetables fairly jumped out of the soil

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and took an interest in doing it quickly and largely. From the seed to luxuriant green scarcely two weeks elapse, and three and four crops of vegetables a year from one patch are not unusual, and in quantities as surprising as the diversity. Two hundred crates of tomatoes and a hundred and fifty to two hundred bushels of sweet potatoes shipped to marketleaving a fifth of the product for home consumption, unfit for market, or overlooked- are an average acre's yield.

South of the Manatee it is mostly pine and scrub palmetto land, not so rich, but well suited for citrus fruits. The native product is the wild Florida orange, still found in remote districts, -a bitter, thinskinned fruit, fit only for preserves, and then only when well sugared. This stock, by grafting and budding with imported stock, has been brought up to its present perfect state. The parent-trees, from which were budded most of the fine Florida as well as California stocks of navel oranges, are to be seen in the experimental grounds of the Department of Agriculture at Washington, sturdy old grand-dads to the millions of luscious beauties we have eaten or shipped away during the past ten years.

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Lemons and pomelos (or grape-fruit, as the pomelo is called, because it grows in grape-like bunches), with the oranges, are the principal products of Manatee. Add to these limes, guavas, and persimmons, and you have the fruit-bearing trees of the district. All of them, excepting the guava, yield single crops per year. The guava is a spring and fall bearing dwarf, most prolific (in full fruit you can hardly see a leaf), and a fine jelly-maker.

Of oranges sixty-five to eighty trees are set out to the acre; of guavas and the

smaller growths there are found as many as two hundred to the acre. An orange tree, fruit-bearing at five years of age, will produce a couple of hundred oranges, or about one boxful; then it doubles its product every year, fifteen hundred and even two thousand fine oranges having been seen on a single tree.

Some growers pick the oranges green and ship them in that condition, but the fruit really ripens about the beginning of November and is picked from then on to the middle of January, during which period. it is frequently kept in storage on the tree so as not to glut the early market. No swaddling-clothes are necessary; no individual tents for the trees; no fires or other frost-fighting devices need be resorted to, as is necessary in other districts. In 1895 and again this year the citrus crops of northern Florida-those not so protected by their owners- were frozen and turned out a complete failure. The Manatee district, being south of the twenty-eighth parallel, escaped those chilling blights, and in fact as well as in theory it is in the frost-proof zone.

The county of Manatee comprises about twelve hundred square miles, not over one hundred of which are under any kind of cultivation, and from this latter area 150,000 boxes of oranges were shipped during the past season. The highest total crop for Florida before the frost of 189495- since when it has never reached anywhere near that point- was 5,000,000 boxes. This year scarcely more than 1,500,000 boxes will be the output, so that this district alone will supply one tenth of Florida's orange crop.

We may here note the superiority of the Florida orange over its California brother. The latter ripens in January, February, and

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March, the colder months, when conditions compel it to take on a thick skin for warm covering. The sap then runs less freely through the tree, and the sun's rays are not sufficiently ardent fully to distil the sugar in the fruit, hence the fruit is comparatively dry and flavorless. On the other hand, in Florida, the fruit, ripening in November and December, has the full benefit of maturing during the summer's ardent sun, the sap flows far more freely, and the orange wears its thinnest clothing; hence is it the sweetest, thinnest-skinned, highest flavored, and juiciest orange in the world. Cuban, Porto Rican, Bahaman, and Mexican oranges have lately been quoted and somewhat feared as competitors, and if some of the advice so freely given by the wise experts recently sent to Cuba and Porto Rico by enterprising magazines is taken, Florida and California would soon be depopulated of its fruit-growers, who, upon reaching those West Indian paradises so glowingly described by the aforesaid wise men, would proceed to raise unsurpassed oranges by saying "Presto," or by some such easy process,- certainly not by irrigation or by the sweat of their brows.

The fact of the matter is that the stock in those countries has not been highly cultivated, and it will take years to bring it up to anywhere near the Florida standard. The further north oranges can be grown the higher is the flavor and better the stock, yet when grown above the twenty-eighth parallel the frost-line already mentioned they are liable to absolute ruin of crop and trees, while in the West Indies they are exposed to the ravages of the frequently recurring hurricanes of those latitudes. These facts, therefore, fully justify the claim that not

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only are the oranges from about the Manatee district the best in the world, but that there is also every reason to believe that that superiority will continue.

Lemon culture in this district is still in

an experimental stage. Trees are grown from Sicilian cuttings, and, the conditions being most favorable, some of the stock is superior even to the very fine parent Sicilian lemons. While it is in its infancy, so much care and study has been given to this culture that it cannot fail to become, in the course of a very few years, a most important source of revenue.

The pomelo, or grape-fruit (an original East Indian fruit introduced into the West Indies from China by Capt. Shaddock early in the eighteenth century, and thence carried up into Florida about twenty-five years ago), is growing in favor with our Northern markets, and rightly too, for to one who has learned how to eat it no more delicious, succulent, pleasing fruit was ever placed upon our tables, a food fit for the gods, wholesome and rich in medicinal qualities, an essentially tropical fruit, yet grown to perfection in this region. It is also a prolific tree, yielding, after ten and twelve years, as many as a thousand fine pomelos.

In driving through the district there may be seen strange shed-like structures, some eight feet high, and roofed over with slats about three inches wide and as far apart. These are imitation forests built to cover and delude pineapples into believing they are still in the shelter of their great native forests. Exposed to the direct rays of a hot sun this fruit becomes woody and shrivels up, but these sheds partially protect it from the sun while allowing free passage for air, dew, and light. The pineapple is a native of the South and Central

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the slat sheds, $1,500 for one acre, may be cited as an instance of the profit in pineapples. Eighteen months-it is a slow grower -- from the time of planting he sold $2,300 of fruit from that acre and had three "shoots" from each parent plant ready and growing for the next crop on that and adjacent acres, valued at $2,500 more!

Naturally there are failures in this as in all ventures, but one cannot help wondering sometimes why people persist in investing in all kinds of wild-cat schemes that promise- but never yield- dividends of ten and fifteen per cent, when good old mother earth, for a little persuading, stands ever ready to make such bountiful returns, at least in some of her favored spots.

With another illustration of pineapple profits we may leave them in peace to

the sale of the "suckers" or lower shoots, and the "slips" or "rattoons" from their superior pine-stock, and, of course, from the sale of their vegetables.

Other patches of land may be seen covered with cheese-cloth, a highly scientific style of farming. On the acres under these cloth coverings tobacco is being raised. Large quantities are also raised in the open, but that grown under shelter from the intense heat of the sun, from caterpillars, worms, dust, and rain, is particularly fine, a leaf without blemish, long, of splendid silky texture, equal to the finest Cuban stock. The leaf is pole-curedCuban fashion-and is specially adapted for fine "wrappers." A thousand pounds. to the acre is the yield, worth, cured and ready for market, all the way from 50 cents to $2.40 a pound.

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