OF SUBDIVISIONS, WISE AND OTHERWISE—OF LANDSCAPE ATROCITIES—OF SMALL FARMS AND FARMERS—AND OF FASCINATING STRAWBERRY AND TOMATO STATISTICS
SUBDIVISIONS extend out of Miami in all directions—up the coast and down the coast and inland and out into the bay in the shape of islands. Palm Beach is seventy-five miles north of Miami; and there are almost enough subdivisions along that seventy-five mile stretch to provide homes for a million people.
Some of the subdivisions are beautiful and some of them are horrible. Some have been thoroughly cleared of the tangled jungle of palmettos and other scrub that makes a total mess of all undeveloped Florida land; and flawless roads and pavements have been constructed, water mains put in, and gas, water and electricity provided. Restrictions are imposed in some of the good ones: homes costing less than four thousand can not be built on certain lots, while on other lots they must cost at least fifteen thousand.
Other subdivisions are laid out purely and simply, as the saying goes, for the purpose of separating the sucker from his money. The streets are half-laid, the location is vile, and the shacks that are run up on the crowded lots are little better than the marshhuts of Revere Beach and Coney Island to which poverty-stricken city dwellers of Boston and New York frequently repaired during the heated terms of the early; ’eighties.
On top of these depressing spectacles, many of which may some day be partly obscured in tropical verdure, certain enterprising citizens of Miami have added to Florida’s scenic beauties by lining the roadsides with blatant sign-boards setting forth the delights of garages, restaurants, clothing emporia and similar enterprises. Not content with building self-sustaining sign-boards which protrude gauntly and repulsively from the flat landscape and convince the newcomer that he is approaching a slum-city, they have nailed countless numbers of huge yellow monstrosities to the palms and fruit-trees along the highways—signs that have no influence on any one except the lover of beauty, and which only serve to fill him with contempt for people who can permit the few natural beauties of their surroundings to be so befouled. In the North one expects to find—as he does find—a plague of sign-boards, and hideous summer resorts whose predominant features are those of the awful and tasteless ’eighties. In the new South, however, which lures tourists with honeyed words and promises of every sort of beauty, the erecting of roadside sign-boards should be viewed with as much disgust and loathing as grapefruit-stealing or murder—both of which crimes fall under somewhat the same head in Miami.
Spreading through and beyond the subdivisions are the orange and grapefruit groves, and the truck gardens and vegetable farms. Oranges and grapefruit are so common in southern Florida that grapefruit are served free in many of the hotels; while many other hotels keep large bowls of free oranges alongside the ice-water tank. So far as is known, these are the only things that one has a chance of getting for nothing in Florida hotels.
There are hundreds of three-acre and five-acre farms owned by northerners who didn’t like winter, and ran away from it with one or two thousand dollars in their pockets. Many of these little farmers not only manage to make both ends meet, but even salt away comfortable bank rolls. One little town near Miami shipped sixty-one thousand quarts of strawberries to northern cities during the first six weeks of the 1922 season, and the growers’ share of the spoils was fifty cents a quart. The wise strawberry farmers, who plant their land to velvet beans during the summer and plow them under in September, and otherwise indulge in the clever tricks of the trade, get some very snappy results. One of the best strawberry farmers near Miami had four and one-tenth acres of land planted to strawberries in 1921. His first berries came in on December twentieth, and he picked twice a week until July fifteenth. The total yield of his four and one-tenth acres was 41,059 quarts, his average price for each quart was forty-five cents, and his gross sales amounted to slightly over eighteen thousand five hundred dollars. His total expenses were a little over six thousand dollars.
More than eight thousand acres are planted to tomatoes in the vicinity of Miami, and nearly five hundred thousand crates were shipped north during the 1921 season. These tomatoes bring the growers about three dollars a crate, of which about a dollar and seventy-five cents must be charged off to fertilizer, labor, hauling and crating. The life of a tomato farmer is not a happy one, for the crop is very sensitive to wet weather. It is also very sensitive to dry weather. The slightest nip of frost also puts a severe crimp in it. Some of the tomato farmers say that the plant is so sensitive that if a man cusses or chews tobacco in its vicinity, it will refuse to bear. In spite of all this, there are plenty of tomato-lovers to plant tomatoes every winter, and some of them have made fortunes out of this popular fruit—or vegetable.