Page:Tree Crops; A Permanent Agriculture (1929).pdf/94

 they can reach them. Growing in a pot is exasperating and at times injurious to a tree that yearns to send roots straight into the ground and needs such a root when it gets to the field. Some California genius invented the so-called splint system. The tree is grown in a little tube of earth an inch or more square and two or three feet long, walled in by four plastering laths. These lath tubes are arranged in banks inclined at an angle of sixty degrees. One lath is soaked in nitrate of soda solution, and to this the little tree clings as ivy to a pole. Thus the little four-inch tree with two feet of roots sticking fast to the lath may have its whole long root system inserted into a crow-bar hole deep in the ground.

This discovery alone may make success where before a very high percentage of loss might have meant delay and greatly increased cost.

In addition to roadside trees a few plantings have been made, some of them over large areas.

A carob boom may be expected any time, and I would not be surprised if this tree becomes the basis of another series of extensive land swindles of which there have been so many in the history of American agriculture—a swindle based upon small tracts planted by the promoter for absentee owners. There are few surer bases of loss for the investor. This hard statement has been proved over and over again with apples, oranges, and pecans and probably will be proved several more times. Perhaps the carob will be the next demonstrating