Page:A Practical Treatise on Olive Culture, Oil Making and Olive Pickling.djvu/36

 with but modest means at their disposal will rather invest in fifty to one hundred acres of hill lands, more or less rocky, if their outlay for the same will not be above that required for the purchase of from ten to twenty acres only of a richer soil, especially if it is fully demonstrated to them that the olive tree will grow well on those steep and stony lands, and that while they are not likely to lose anything in quantity, relatively to a richer soil, they will gain the advantage of a finer quality in the product.

Let us thus study the cost of a plantation and its proper care on rocky lands, the price of which may vary from $10 to $30 per acre, according to their nearness to or remoteness from a city, or facilities of transportation. I will take in this as a basis, my own plantation of about 6,000 olive trees, which I made in 1884 on hill lands, most of them inaccessible to the plow, and where I have had all the work done by hand.

Planting as much as possible at a distance of twenty feet—for on such places regular lines could not be made—we have about one hundred trees per acre, leaving out the very few patches where it is utterly impossible to plant even an olive tree. We will select for this plantation, one year old rooted cuttings, coming directly, or originally, from trees that have been grafted, of which the stem will be hardly from ten to twelve inches high, and the roots from three to six inches long.

For such small trees it will be sufficient to dig