A year or so after being set in its permanent place, and after it has put on a healthy new growth, all nursery stock should be budded from well-known varieties of its own kind. After this the young tree must be well fed at least once in six months; it must be protected from high winds, and its delicate surface roots must be guarded against extremes of either heat or cold. Both trunks and branches must be kept clean and free from sap-sucking insects by occasional washings or sprayings, and a thick body growth must be pruned out so as to insure a free circulation of light and air, as well as to encourage a stronger growth of terminal branches, which, in all trees, are the fruit bearers. The South, including all the Gulf States, contains vast areas of cheap lands available for fruit culture, while semi-tropical Florida, lying south of latitude 27°, offers a vast and as yet but little developed field for three fruit crops, the cultivation of which is but just begun. Most important of these, at present, is the pineapple, which can be raised in no other part of the United States, and which is grown in fields or "patches" of five, ten, or twenty acres. The fruit, or "apple," occupies the centre of a plant two or three feet high, having bayonetlike spiny leaves. It is not propagated from seed, but by slips or miniature plants that spring from the base of the apple, and which in turn will bear fruit eighteen months after being set out. These slips are worth one cent or one and a half cents each, and ten or twelve thousand of them, of which two-thirds will produce fruit, may be planted to the acre. The harvest, or cutting season, begins in April and lasts until June, so that pineapples are brought into Northern markets at a time when they are most nearly destitute of other fruits. Although the pineapple is so perishable that, for shipment by sea, it must be cut some two weeks before it is ripe, and so has come to be regarded in the North as a sour, hard, and indigestible fruit, it is when allowed to ripen in its native field, after being mellowed by weeks of a tropical sun to a golden yellow, one of the richest, sweetest, and most luscious of all fruits.