Page:A Practical Treatise on Olive Culture, Oil Making and Olive Pickling.djvu/20

 The small trees, when one year old, will develop with astonishing vigor when planted in their permanent sites; their tap-roots will sink rapidly; they will stand, without suffering, drought and hot weather, and not more than one in every two or three hundred will fail to grow. Not only had I occasion to verify this, but I have also observed that when so planted, without experiencing any amputation of their roots and branches, they will overtake in life and vigor before two or three years those which, planted older and larger, have had to undergo the mutilations which are rendered necessary by their greater age and a consequently more developed root system.

Mr. W. G. Klee, in a bulletin of the University of California, says that the mode of reproduction by large cuttings is liable to several objections. He claims justly that there will never be so fine a root system developed as by starting the trees from small herbaceous cuttings. He recommends to take from young, growing trees, the young tops, when neither very soft nor perfectly hard, having three to four sets of leaves, and to put them in a little frame with sand, where they are to be given a few waterings during the course of a month. He states that in three or four months the little cuttings will have rooted, and in a few months more will be found ready to set out. He adds that olive trees planted in the Santa Cruz mountains were propagated in this manner, that they received no irrigation after