Fresh Vegetables

And Fruit

New Possibility For Tropics

From Our Own Correspondent.

Honolulu, June 20.

FOLKS in the tropics yearn for nice crisp green lettuce, succulent tomatoes, juicy ripe fruit. Rarely do the dreams come true for many reasons.

However, it looks like the dreams will come true every time, even out of season, which will be something, if the new science of hydroponics (see your diction ary) now being developed by the Uni versity of California continues with its amazing results.

Crops of vegetables are grown in water-tight tubs of chemically treated water. Not a grain of sand or soil is needed. This year the university dis patched students to all corners of the globe, to check the theory under vary ing types of climate.

One place chosen was Wake Island, the U.S. navy reservation in mid-Pacific.

The hardiest forms of vegetation have a tough time, growing on bleak, exposed Wake.

However, Lamory Laumeister, a sen ior majoring in agrobiology (see your dictionary again), confidently landed at Wake, tubs, chemicals and seeds and all.

Studious Mr. Laumeister set to work.

He got the surprise of his life. The extraordinary light intensity of Wake upset his formulae compiled in the com paratively gentle climate of California.

His chemically watered plants at Wake shot heavenwards and ran to stalk and leaf with too little fruit. Biologist Laumeister pondered Nature’s over-gen erosity. He worked out new combin ations of chemicals; poured them into the tubs.

Unexpectedly this caused the discov ery of one of the most important possi bilities offered by hydroponics: that the taste and quality of fruits and vege tables, produced by this newest branch of agriculture, can be controlled.

So at Wake Island student Laumeister has produced crops of every garden vege table; lettuce, beans, carrots, squash, maize, cucumber, melons, pineapples, pawpaws.

Lately he popped some strawberry seeds into his tubs. Strawberries any time of the year in mid-Pacific ?

Hats off to chemistry!