IF my experience or observation in Florida, the past five years, are of any use, I willingly give them, though I am sorry to dampen any one's bright hopes, in planting fruit trees, as so many more are needed every year.

I see many persons are hoping to grow grapes in Florida for wine, or to ship the ripe grapes. My constant care, the past five years, has been to learn what profit could be realized in that way myself; but I have been forced to the conclusion that Florida soil and climate do not and cannot suit the requirements of wine-making, or grape-growing for shipment in the bunch. I tried twenty varieties at Fer-nandina, eighteen feet drainage; also fifteen varieties at Sand Point, Indian River, some fifteen feet drainage; and here, some twelve varieties, four to ten feet drainage.

The leaf roller destroyed the foliage on most all the kinds, except the Scuppernong and Clinton.

The fruit of all the grapes I have seen in Florida show the effect of too much water at the roots, by not ripening uniformly in the bunch, and this is the reason why it will not be profitable to make wine. The heavy rains, that fall here, at any season of the year, may at any time ruin the entire vineyard in a few days. These rains are not confined to the summer, as we often read they are, but occur all through the year with as much irregularity as at other places, some seasons being dry and others wet; and after a period of some two years, a soil less than fifteen feet drainage, receiving a fall of rain of twelve inches in twenty-four hours, with not much fall to draw off the surplus, must of necessity ruin the grape roots that had been induced, during the dry seasons, to go deep for moisture. One season was so dry here in May, that the soil in a newly cleared field took fire, and burned in many places to the depth of eight feet.(?)

This irregularity of moisture will explain why so many grape-vines die suddenly here in Florida after growing rapidly and bearing one or two heavy crops. I hear of many such cases. The few cases where the Malaga and other grapes are grown near buildings, and thus protected, have induced many to think they would succeed anywhere.

The Scuppernong, of which so much is hoped for in the South for wine, will not answer for a wine grape unless some shrewd Yankee will invent some milking process to gather the grapes; they do not ripen all at once, even in their small bunches. No one can make it profitable to pick grapes at the rate of five or six cents per quart for wine making. Wine making from a wet country has never, and can never be a success like it is from drier soils and climates.

Wine cellars in Florida must be almost, if not quite, an impossibility, and even if ever constructed, I think it would require a lot of persuasion to induce any true Floridian to ever enter one during snake season.