Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER in. FROM SEED TO GROVE. Few amateur orange growers realize the importance of good, thrifty stock at the very outset, but it is a point that can not be too strongly insisted on, for herein lies the corner-stone of a successful grove. Given poor, diseased, stunted stock, and you may lavish time, money, care upon it, and be worse off in five years' time than when you began ; given good, thrifty stock, and half the time, money, and care will find you, in the same space, the owner of as fine a young grove as one would need to possess. How to secure such reliable stock ? Well, there are three ways: one, to go to a neighbor who has preceded you by several years and has seedlings for sale, purchase them and bud them yourself; another, to purchase trees ready budded from a reliable nurseryman ; and still another, which will best suit a shallow pocket, is to plant the seed, and when the trees are a suitable size bud them yourself. There is a right and wrong way of doing every thing in this world, and it is sometimes curious to see how frequently the wrong way is chosen when the right way seems just as easy, and is certainly productive of more satisfactory results. Now, in this apparently simple matter of planting seeds, most persons will take the seeds haphazard from any orange they may happen upon, and going out, will punch a hole in the ground with a finger, drop in a seed, give it a pat downward, and go away exultant, and return in a week or two expecting to dig up a fine, healthy plant. Others will push the seed down into boxes and water them carefully every day and rot them;while others will not water them at all, but leave the sun to shine upon their covering of soil and dry it to a powder. And then they wonder and scold—these three types of amusing people—becau...