Los Angeles daily herald., 1889-05-10
ORANGE GROWING.
The Difficulties That Have
Beset the Industry.
THE LADYBUG'S GOOD WORK.
How the Little Australian Stranger
Plays Havoc on the COttony-
Cushion Scale Pest.

Foremost among all the profitable pro.
ducts of this section has always stood
the orange. For a hundred years the
trees have been grown here, and mar
velous almost beyond the limits OF credi.
bility have been the profits from this
poetic industry. Twenty years ago Don
Benito Wilson harvested $1,000 from
each acre OF Seeding trees in his orchard
At all times for the past ten years good
groves have been paying from $500 to
$3.50 per acre to the possessors. These
great revenues naturally drew many into
the business, and SO large were the
paintings in the early years of tie cur
rent decade that many people feared
there would be no market for the crop.
Yet, the end of the decade is at hand.
There is but one more crop to harvest
before its close, and $4,000 carloads, or
three. quarters of a million boxes of the
Golden apples OF the modern Hesperides
will be all OF the crop to ship. 1t all finds
ready sales in the cities of the East and
at fairly good prices. Many orchards in
the section this year will pay $500 to 5000
to the acre.
1t is long story, but too we'll known
to require retelling how it comes that
there are not 900 carloads OF oranges to
ship instead of one. The great excite
ment in town lot making, by which
many fine groves persisted and the
ravages o. the several sorts OF scale pests
are the cause of so lamentable an effe ct.
&c tn fha loffor of ntiny, ic IN, ho
directed in this article. The other has
been its own cure.
About 1880 the red scale made its ap-
pearance in this county at Sunny Slope
and about Orange. 1t came from Aus
tralia in some imported trees. A few
years later the white, cottony, cushion
pearance almost sim ultaneously at q
dozen places in the county. Since then
the most interchangeable war has been
maintained against the two pests. Hor-
ticulture was new business to the most
of the orange growers, and the strange
nature of these two pests made them
formidable to the most intelligent and
most experienced men in the business.
All sorts of washes, sprays and gases
have been tried, but to little practical
avail. The trouble with them all has been
that all parts of the tree could not
reached, and wherever bug was left he
increased and multiplied after the law
of his kind 30 rapidly that, before an
orchard of five acres could be all treated
those trees first sprayed we're again in
tested. All sorts Of methods ere tried,
and it was alleged that the carelessness
of the growers was largely at fault. OF
nroof Ennf tho oil
for awhile, when neglect allowed the
month. Col. J. R. Dobbins, of San Ga
county. 1t covers some forty acres and he
on the trees. For a long time his SUI
three years ago the bugs began to get
his beautiful orchard was in a
bad plight. He has applied all sorts of
remedies, he has spent mint of money
in great endeavor to clean his trees. It
was said that thorough fertilizing would
keep the trees clean. He put on, at great
expense, phosphates, bonemeal and well
rotted barnyard composts. They merely
add vital force to the tree, and give it
KTtd.6T I6blS pOWCt Dub WAdt LAUGHS
the trees, unfortunately fattens the bugs
too. They have decided preference for
q strong, vigorous tree. The use of
washes, sprays and gases, in time tells
upon the health of the tree, and while
the bug increases on it's stem and
branches again, it has much less vitality
and resistant power. The treatment
threatened to kill the tree before the pest
was done for.
Many intelligent people thought some
remedy would grow out OF natural laws,
by which the destructive parasites would
be swept away. There are many reasons
for such hope; but hope deferred
affairs. Last summer there seemed to
come a ray of hope. The white scale
bug died from some disease so that mil
lions of the pest persisted from the trees.
Orchards which had been covered as if
with snow, became partially clean. The
ground around the trees was covered
with dead pests. But this disease did
not quite extirpate the cottony-cushion
plague. 1t did great deal in that direc.
ton; and it has not yet passed away.
The bug is no longer, as rule, the fat,
robust, lusty fellow he was at first.
He looks as if bad consumption
were in his blood. Trees that were liter
ally fluted with the scale are now COM
paratively clean, and the new crop Ct
bugs is weak and sickly. Thousands of
them are dying in the larva state and
never mature. 1t is quite likely that the
acme of the difficulty has been reached,
and that natural causes alone could in
few We ,rs rid the country of this pest.
But the intelligent orchardist5 of the sec
ton do not propose to trust to any
chance or the operation of any tardy
course to free them from their enemy.
The orchards are too valuable for that.
Il has been we'll known for years that
the same pest attacked the orange groves
of the Antipodes, and that those
of Au, ITALIA were we'll nigh de-
stroyed by this pest. In Il a
country there appeared parasite which
fed upon the scale parasite, and in few
years the bug destroyer PIT u timely end
to the tree destroyer. This second pa
rasite is an int t like the ladybug, SO
we'll known in this section. Our insect
is a |, at.eater, but the new one in Aus
tralia is carniverous. He lives on bugs
and prefers the cotton-cushion scale be-
fore all other meat. The knowledge of
these facts came to the ears of Los An
geles ORANGE grow ers, and they were
discussing the question of sending man
to Australia u get colony of the
ladybuga, when Professor Riley, the
United States Entomologist at Washing
ton. informed them that the Government
wof,ld do that Accordingly Pro-