Coconuts

The Coconut Palm (Cocos nucifera) is one of the most useful of the extensive family to which it belongs, supplying food, clothing, and materials for houses, utensils of various types, rope, and oil. The coconut palm is perhaps the only tree from which you could build, rig, and supply a ship with bread, wine, water, oil, vinegar, sugar, and other commodities. During colonial times, products from the coconut tree could comprise the entire cargo of some trade vessels. 

1. The stem is used for bridges, posts, beams, rafters, ramparts, loopholes, walking sticks, and paddles for canoes. 

2. The coconut is used for--milk, a delicious drink; meat from the scraped nut, for various kinds of food; jelly, pulp, nut, oil, excellent and various food for man, beast, and fowl. 

The shell for vessels to drink out of, water pitchers, lamps, funnels, and Fuel. 

The fiber is used for cord, bed stuffing, thread, scrub-brushes, girdle (ornamental), whisk for flies, and medicines. 

3. The leaf is used for thatch for houses, lining for houses, mats, baskets, fans, bedding, brooms, and candles. 

Along the Gulf of Cariaco there are many large coco walks. In moist and fertile ground it begins to bear abundantly the fourth year; but in dry soils it does not produce fruit until the tenth. Its duration does not generally exceed 80 or 100 years, at which period its mean height is about 80 feet. Throughout this coast a coco tree supplies annually about 100 nuts.  

The most favorable situation for the growth of the coco palm is the ground near the coast, and if the roots reach the mud or salt water, they thrive all the better for it.  

The coco-nut is essentially a maritime plant, and is always one of the first to make its appearance on coral and other new islands in tropical seas, the nut being floated to them, and rather benefiting than otherwise by its immersion in the salt water. Silex and soda are the two principal salts, which the coconut abstracts from the soil, and hence, where these do not exist in great abundance, the tree does not thrive well.  

Take the case now of a plantation of 100 acres in extent. This would give us 5,800 trees, which, at 50 nuts per tree, 290,000 nuts.  This would be a handsome return from 100 acres of any land, requiring no cultivation or care whatever, after the fourth year, and yielding the same amount for upwards of half a century!  

A kind of sugar made from the sap is called "jaggery," and the sap when fermented forms an intoxicating beverage known as toddy. The fibrous outer covering, or husk of the nut, when macerated and prepared, is termed "coir," and is spun into yarn and rope. 

The coconut is usually planted as follows: 

Selecting a suitable place, you drop into the ground a fully ripe nut, and leave it. In a few days a thin lance-like shoot forces itself through a minute hole in the shell, pierces the husk, and soon unfolds three pale green leaves in the air; while, originating in the same soft white sponge which now completely fills the nut, a pair of fibrous roots pushing away the stoppers which close two holes in an opposite direction, penetrate the shell, and strike vertically into the ground. A day or two more, and the shell and husk, which in the last and germinating stage of the nut are so hard that a knife will scarcely make any impression, spontaneously burst by some force within; and, henceforth, the hardy young plant thrives apace, and needing no culture, pruning, or attention of any sort, rapidly arrives at maturity. In four or five years it bears; in twice as many more it begins to lift its head among the groves, where, waxing strong, it flourishes for near a century.

The fruitfulness of the tree is remarkable. As long as it lives it bears, and without intermission. Two hundred nuts, besides innumerable white blossoms of others, may be seen upon it at one time; and though a whole year is required to bring any one of them to the germinating point, no two, perhaps, are at one time in precisely the same stage of growth.