File:Puerto Rico and its resources (1899) (14774152251).jpg

Identifier: puertoricoitsres00ober (find matches)
Title: Puerto Rico and its resources
Year: 1899 (1890s)
Authors: Ober, Frederick A. (Frederick Albion), 1849-1913
Subjects: Natural resources
Publisher: New York, D. Appleton and Co.
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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d by planting rows of bananasand plantains for the first and wind-breaks oflarge trees for the second. It will begin tobear in about three years, and continue to in-crease its yield for a dozen years thereafter. Plant-ed at a distance of ten to twenty feet apart, thespaces between the trees may be utilized for catch crops of such vegetables as eddoes, yams, pigeon peas, and sweet potatoes, while the shel-tering banana plants themselves will yield a crop offruit the second year, but should not be allowed toremain after the fourth. The Arabian coffee does best at an averageheight above the sea of fifteen hundred to threethousand feet, and this is where, in those mountain-ous islands of the West Indies, climate, scenery,and hygienic conditions exist in perfection. Thelife of a coffee planter, however, is necessarily anisolated one, and it is a question whether many peo-ple can endure the environment of solitude, the ab-sence of schools and society; but that depends uponindividual tastes.
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SUGAR, TOBACCO, COFFEE, AND CACAO. 65 A romantic story attaches to the introductionof coffee into the West Indies, all the subsequentgroves, it is said, having been derived from a singleplant, presented by a magistrate of Amsterdam toLouis XIV of France in 1714. The Dutch con-trolled the output of coffee then, and were veryjealous lest it should spread to islands not in theirpossession, but plants from this parent tree weresent from France to Martinique. The voyage waslong and the water gave out on board ship, but thebotanist in charge deprived himself of half his al-lowance daily and shared it with the plants. Fromthis small beginning grew the groves which nowadorn not only the hill and mountain sides of Mar-tinique, but of Puerto Rico. As the coffee trees if allowed to grow will reacha height of from thirty or forty feet and as thebest coffee grows at the top, it is necessary to cutthem down to not more than six or eight feet, bywhich process they are made accessible to the pickers.

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