Fig Culture In California And How It Can Be Made A Great Industry

Author : B. M. Lelong
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781332235841
Total Pages : 66 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (358 download)

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Download or read book California Fig Industry written by B. M. Lelong and published by . This book was released on 2015-08-05 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from California Fig Industry: With a Chapter on Fig Caprification; Written for the Annual Report of the California State Board of Agriculture for 1891 The fig is probably the oldest of all cultivated fruits. It is mentioned in the first book of the Bible, and is more frequently referred to in both the Old and New Testaments than any other fruit. Herodotus alludes to it, and in the early history of our race it played an important part among food products. The Greeks received the tree from Caria, whence its name, Ficus carica, but improved the fruit so greatly that Attic figs became celebrated and were in large demand, so much so that stringent laws regulating their export were enacted. Pliny mentions several varieties, and alludes especially to that produced in Ebusus as highly esteemed by Roman epicures, and mentions the Roman fig as supplying a large part of the food of the slaves, especially of those engaged in agricultural pursuits, by whom large quantities were eaten raw at the time of the fig harvest. It is probably a native of the eastern Mediterranean regions, but has spread from its original home over a large portion of the known world. It is to-day found in all the warm, temperate, sub-tropic, and northern tropical zones. It flourishes on the plains of northwestern India, on the Himalayas to an elevation of five thousand feet, in Afghanistan, northern Persia, Asia Minor, Palestine, northern Africa, and the warmer parts of Europe, ripening its fruit in sheltered places, even so far north as the southern portion of England. It has been naturalized in Australia, the north island of New Zealand, Chile, California, and other portions of the United States. It flourishes in Florida and the Southern States, and will grow and bear fruit in the open air of some of the Middle States with proper care. In California, of all the States in the Union, it appears to attain its most thrifty growth, and some trees now growing in this State are phenomenally large. Immense trees, the largest in this State, of the White Adriatic fig, grow at Knight's Ferry, in Stanislaus County. They bear enormously, and are a source of great profit to their owner. One of these is sixty feet in height, its branches shading a circle of seventy feet diameter. At its base the trunk is eleven feet in circumference, and at three feet from the ground it is nine feet around. Several large branches divide the tree a little above this point, each of which has a circumference of nearly five feet; while at a distance of thirty feet from the ground the limbs have a diameter of seven to eight inches. The largest grove in this vicinity consists of fifteen massive black fig trees, set at a distance of sixty feet apart, yet intermingling their boughs overhead until a dense shade is formed beneath them. At Rancho Chico, in Butte County, is a fig tree planted in 1856, which measures eleven feet in circumference one foot from the ground. Its branches have been trained to the ground, where they have struck root and formed new trunks, until they cover an area of a hundred feet in diameter. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.