Page:Tree Crops; A Permanent Agriculture (1929).pdf/122



(1) The trees are cheap because they are so easy of propagation.

(2) The tree is very casy to transplant.

(3) It grows rapidly.

(4) It bears as early as any other fruiting tree now grown in the United States, perhaps earliest of all.

(5) The fruit is nutritious and may be harvested without cost.

(6) The tree bears with great regularity as far north as the Middle Atlantic States and New England, also through the Cotton Belt and much of the Corn Belt, and even beyond it into the drier lands.

(7) It has a long fruiting season.

(8) It bears fruit in the shady parts of the tree as well as in the sunshine, and thus has unusual fruiting powers.

(9) It has the unusual power of recovery from frost to the extent of making a partial crop the same season that one crop is destroyed.

(10) The fruit has a ready and stable market since swine and other animals turn it into meat, a product for which there is no prospect of a really glutted market, such as haunts the growers of so many crops.

(11) The trunk of the tree is excellent for posts, and the branches make fair firewood for the farm stove. It is doubtless worth growing in many sections for wood alone.

(12) While attacked to some extent by caterpillars, it prospers at present in most parts of its area without spraying, and seems to have fewer enemies than most other valuable trees.