We bought our first seedlings from the agricultural institute far off. We bought three types of seedlings: the tall type, the medium height type and the short type. The shorter, the faster they produce and the taller, the hardier they are.
The tall type takes about eight years to produce; the medium type takes about five years to produce while the short type takes about three years to produce.
We bought a total of eighteen seedlings at a height of about two feet. The holes to plant them in had to be deeper than those of all the other fruit seedlings planted in the homestead. The difficulty was in their accepting the shift to our stony location and was more pronounced than in the other fruit seedlings like the citrus yet this was a region dominated by them.
Of the eighteen, half died soon after despite our nursing them every day. The same difficulties that befell some of the citrus fruit seedlings bothered them. The area being stony made the roots find it difficult to penetrate deeper and that is why the surviving seedlings were slow in development and also caused the death of some.
Unfortunately, we never tasted any of them because we left the farm before any of them produced and also due to the fact that they were the last to be planted when the other fruit seedlings were already big.