content, show remarkable food values and even suggest the possibility of rivalry to cane sugar and beet sugar.[1]
Human foods from carobs must stand at present on the list of perfectly good possibilities. Meanwhile there is an open door for their use as a stock food. Carob stock food has the outstanding and perfectly established qualities.
THE EARLY CAROB TREES IN CALIFORNIA
The carob tree is demonstrating itself in California in a manner much like that by which so many other Mediterranean crop plants have come to the front. Early plantings[2] in the first few decades of American occupation resulted in fruiting trees by 1885. As a result the California State Horticulturist reported in 1890, "No tree distributed by the stations is more likely to make a popular shade or ornamental tree for dry rocky situations."[3]
In 1912 Dr. Aaron Aaronson visited California and reported that individual carob trees in Palestine produced three to five hundred pounds, and five tons to an acre might be produced."[4]
- ↑ The cane sugar production of Louisiana per acre for the five year period, 1921-25, was 1,988 pounds, while the beet sugar fields of the United States yielded about three thousand pounds. It may be casier to produce a ton of carob beans than of sugar beets or sugar cane. The process for manufacturing carob sugar is entirely unsolved, but in this age of chemical engineering it should be a comparatively simple matter to develop a technique if desirable.
- ↑ H. J. Webber. Professor of Sub-tropical Horticulture in the University of California and Director of the Citrus Experiment Station at Riverside, says in a letter of February 14, 1927:
"The carob has been planted more or less all over southern California, largely as a street tree, but in some places commercial plantings have been made. The tree has proved hardy and very drought-resistant. After it is once started it thrives fairly well without irrigation, which indicates that it is quite drought-resistant, as it is very few plants, for instance the pepper tree and eucalyptus, that manage to survive at all here in southern California without irrigation."
- ↑ P. 431. Bulletin 9. California Agricultural Experiment Station, article entitled The Carob in California, I. J. Condit. June, 1919.
- ↑ "Dr. Aaronson, of Palestine, who attended the Fresno Convention in 1912, said that seedling trees will produce an average of 350 to 500 pounds
