Planting.

We have pointed out the necessity of selecting seed trees of known good bearing habits, and equal care should be exercised in selecting those the nuts of which are well formed and uniform. This precaution will suggest itself when one observes that some trees have the habit of producing a few very large nuts and many of very small and irregular size and shape, and it is obviously to the planter’s interest to lend no assistance to the propagation and transmission of such traits. In view of what has been previously stated, it is almost superfluous earnestly to recommend planters to sow no seeds from young trees. The principle for this contention—that no seed should be selected except from trees of established, well-known fruiting habits—would seem to cover the ground effectually.

The best seed should be selected and picked when perfectly mature and lowered to the ground. The fall from a lofty tree not infrequently cracks the inner shell, without giving any external evidence of the injury. A seed so injured will never sprout and therefore is worthless for seed purposes.

Freshly collected seed nuts contain in the husk more moisture than is required to effect germination, and if planted in this condition, decay is apt to set in before germination occurs. To avoid this the natives tie them in pairs, sling them over bamboo poles where they are exposed to the air but sheltered from the sun, and leave them until well sprouted. It is, however, more expeditious to pile the nuts up in small heaps of eight to ten nuts, in partial shade, where the surface nuts may be sprinkled occasionally to prevent complete drying out.

Germination is very erratic, sometimes occurring within a month and sometimes extending over four, five, or more months. When the young shoot or plumule (see illustration) has fairly thrust its way through the fibrous husk it is a good practice to go over the heaps and segregate those that have sprouted, carefully placing them so that the growing tip be not deformed or distorted by the pressure of superincumbent nuts. When these sprouts are 30 to 50 cm. high, and a few roots have thrust through the husk, they are in the best possible condition for permanent planting.

First. The original preparation of the land should be good and the surface tilth at the time of planting irreproachable; i. e., free from weeds and so mellow that the soil can be closely and properly pressed around the roots by hand.

Fig 3.—Germination of cocoanut.

Second. The orchard should be securely protected from the invasion of cattle, etc. It is sometimes impossible to protect orchards against entry of these animals. If the success of these precautions can not be assured, then the nuts had better be grown in a closely protected nursery until about a year old, when the albumen of the seed will be completely assimilated and will therefore no longer attract vermin, and when the larger size of the plant will give it more protection from stray cattle.

In either case planting should be made concurrently with the opening of the rainy monsoon, during which season further field operations will not be required except when an intermittent, drier period indicates the advisability of running the cultivator.

The planting “pit” fetish, in such common use in India, has nothing to commend it. If stable manures of any kind are available, a good application at the time of planting will effect wonders in accelerating the growth of the young plants.

Where the necessary protection is assured, the young seedling planted out as above recommended should start at once, without check of any kind, into vigorous growth.

The nursery-grown subject receives an unavoidable setback. Its roots have been more or less mutilated and, as we may not prune the top sufficiently to compensate for the root injury, it is generally several months before the equilibrium of top and root is fully restored. In most cases, by the end of the second year, it will have been far outstripped in the growing race by the former.

The history, habits, and characteristics of the cocoanut tree indicate that it needs a full and free exposure to sun, air, and wind; and, as it makes a tree, under such circumstances, of wide crown expansion, these indispensables can not be secured except by very wide planting.

Conventional recommendations cover all distances, from 5 to 8 meters, with quincunx (i. e., triangular plantings) urged when the 8-meter plan is adopted. But the writer has seen too many groves spaced at this distance in good soil, with interlacing leaves and badly spindled in the desperate struggle for light, air, and sun, ever to recommend the quincunx, or any system other than the square, at distances not less than 9 meters and, in good soils, preferably 9.5 meters.

The former distance will allow for 123 and the latter 111 trees to the hectare. They should be lined out with the greatest regularity, so as to admit at all times of cross plowing and cultivation as desired.

From this time forward the treatment is one of cultural and manurial routine.

Annual plowings should not be dispensed with during the life of the plantation. These plowings may be relatively shallow, sufficient to cover under the green manures and crops that are made an indispensable condition to the continued profitable conduct of the industry. Nothing is to be gained by the removal of the earliest flowering spikes. Flowering is the congestion of sap at a special point which, if the grower could control it, he would wish to direct, in the case of young plants, to the building up of leaf and wood. Cutting the inflorescence of the cocoanut results in profuse bleeding and, unless this be checked by the use of a powerful styptic or otherwise, it is doubtful if the desired end would be accomplished. The earlier crops of nuts should all be taken with extension cutters or from ladders. No shoulders for climbing should be cut in any tree, the stem of which has not become dense, hard, and woody. Cut when the wood is the least bit succulent, they become inviting points of attack for borers.

With these reservations, there is everything to commend the practice of shouldering the tree, as offering the safest, most expeditious and economical way of making it possible to climb and secure the harvest. It is, of course, understood that the cuts should be made sloping outward, so as not to collect moisture and invite decay, and no larger than is strictly necessary for the purpose.

Manuring.1

The manuring problem must be met and solved by the best resources at our command. The writer has had pointed out hundred of trees that, wholly guiltless of any direct application of manure, have borne excellent crops for many successive years; but he has also seen hundreds of others in their very prime, at thirty years, which once produced a hundred select nuts per year, now producing fluctuating and uncertain crops of fifteen to thirty inferior fruits.

Time and again native growers have told me of the large and uniformly continuous crops of nuts from the trees immediately overshadowing their dwellings and, although some have attributed this to a sentimental appreciation and gratitude on the part of the palm at being made one of the family of the owner, a few were sensible enough to realize that it came of the opportunity that those particular trees had to get the manurial benefit of the household sewage and waste.

Yet, the lesson is still unlearned and, after much diligent inquiry, I have yet to find a nut grower in the Philippines who at any time (except at planting) makes direct and systematic application of manure to his trees.

In India, Ceylon, the Penang Peninsula, and Cochin China, where the tree has been cultivated for generations, the most that was ever attempted until very recently was to throw a little manure in the hole where the tree was planted, and for all future time to depend on the inferior, grass-made droppings of a few cattle tethered among the trees, to compensate for the half million or more nuts that a hectare of fairly productive trees should yield during their normal bearing life.

Upon suitable cocoanut soils—i. e., those that are light and permeable—common salt is positively injurious. In support of this contention, I will state that salt in solution will break up and freely combine with lime, making equally soluble chlorids of lime which, of course, freely leach out in such a soil and carry down to unavailable depths these salts, invaluable as necessary bases to render assimilable most plant foods; and that, on this account, commercial manures containing large amounts of salt, are always to be used with much discretion, owing to the danger of impoverishing the supply of necessary lime in the soil.

Finally, so injurious is the direct application of salt to the roots of most plants that the invariable custom of trained planters (who, for the sake of the potash contained, are compelled to use crude Stassfurt mineral manures, which contain large quantities of common salt) is to apply it a very considerable time before the crop is planted, in order that this deleterious agent should be well leached and washed away from the immediate field of root activity.

That the cocoanut is able to take up large quantities of salt may not be disputed. That the character of its root is such as to enable it to do so without the injury that would occur to most cultivated plants I have previously shown, while the history of the cocoanut’s inland career, and the records of agricultural chemistry, both conclusively point to the fact that its presence is an incident that in no way contributes to the health, vigor, or fruitfulness of the tree.

Mr. Cochran’s analysis, based upon the unit of 1,000 average nuts, weighing in the aggregate 3,125 pounds, discloses a drain upon soil fertility for that number, amounting in round numbers to—

Reducing this to crop and area, and taking 60 fruits per annum per tree as a fair mean for the bearing groves in our cocoanut districts and on those rare estates where a systematic spacing of about 173 trees to the hectare has been made, we should have an annual harvest of 10,300 nuts, or, stated in round numbers, 10,000, which will exhaust each year from the soil a total of—

The cocoanut, therefore, while a good feeder, may not be classed with the most depleting of field crops.

To make this clear I exhibit, by way of contrast, the drafts made by a relatively good crop of two notoriously soil-impoverishing crops—tobacco and corn—and, on the other hand, the drafts made by an equivalent average cotton crop—a product considered to make but light drains upon sources of soil fertility.

A proportionate tobacco crop of 1,000 kilos per hectare will withdraw from the soil (reduced to the same standard of weights adopted by Mr. Cochran)—

An equivalent crop of shelled corn, say, of 125 bushels per hectare, will withdraw—

while a relative crop of lint cotton of 237 kilos (700 pounds) per hectare2 will only exhaust, in round numbers—

There is an analogy between these four products that makes them all comparable, in so far as all are largely surface feeders, and, as experience shows that there can be no continuing success with the last three that does not include both cultivation and manuring, we may use the analogy to infer a like indispensable necessity for the successful issue of the first.

Cultivation as a manurial factor should, therefore, not be overlooked, and all the more strongly does it become emphasized by the very difficulties that for some years to come must beset the Philippine planter in the way of procuring direct manures.

When it comes to the specific application of manures and how to make the most of our resources, we shall have to turn back to the analysis of the nut and note that, relatively to other crops, it makes small demands for nitrogen. At the same time it must not be forgotten that these chemical determinations only refer to the fruit and that, with the present incomplete data and lack of investigation of the constituent parts of root, stem, leaf, and branch, we have nothing to guide us but what we may infer from the behavior of the plant and its relationship to plants of long-deferred fruition, whose manurial wants are well understood.

It is now the most approved orchard practice to encourage an early development of leaf and branch by the liberal application of nitrogen, whose stimulant actions upon growth are conceded as the best.

In temperate regions, the exigencies of climate exact that this be done with discretion and care, in order that the unduly stimulated growths may be fully ripened and matured against the approach of an inclement season. In the