March i, 1883.] 



THE TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST. 



693 



COFFEE PLANTING: WASH AND WEEDS. 

 We commeuJ to the attention of ouv planting reailora 

 liei-e, in India and otlier planting countries, tlie do- 

 liverance on the vexed question of weeds and weeding 

 whicli foUows. It is from one of the oldest of our Ceylon 

 planters, cue who has passed through the " weedy " period 

 of Ceylon plantations, to that when "clean" weeding 

 became the rule, and who has sui'vived now to liear 

 the wisdom of the latter system disputed : — , 



" Few places have sufl'ered more from wash tlian that 

 I have now in charge, thickly covered with bambu (the 

 Sinhalese batali). To root it all out was an absohitely 

 necessary preliminary to 'cultivation ; besides that 

 tlio sm'face soil consists almost eutu'cly of worm castings — 

 tlie lightest and most portable of all kinds of earth. 

 Thus, to begin mth, there was a light broken-up soil, 

 especially lialde to wash. To counteract this evil, I 

 made numerous drains, but after watching then- opera- 

 tion I became convinced that no possible system of 

 ih-ains could act to any gi'eat extent, either in prevent- 

 ing, or very much retarduig wash, when an exceptionally 

 heavy shower fell, and the whole hillside becomes a 

 shallow stream. If the drains are steep, they merely in- 

 tercept and cany ofl' all that falls into them ; if they 

 are on an easy gradient, stones, sticks, and other loose 

 things dam them up, till the silt fills them, and they 

 overflow, and the accumulated water and sUt takes the 

 the hillside at the nearest. I tried to catch some part 

 of the silt by embanking across ravines, hut the tre- 

 mendous rushes came and swept the too feeble barriers 

 away in a few rftuiutes. By the lessons of experience 

 however I succeeded in estabhsliing several silt pits, 

 in which many huudi'eds of cartloads of silt have accu- 

 mulated, but that consists chiefly of sand, as all the finer 

 portions of earth, held suspended in the muddy 

 water, were carried away to emich the neighbom-- 

 ing paddy-fields, or even to go further afield, some of 

 it no doubt, to find final repose, in the bottom of 

 the ocean. The descent of sm-face soil on thick sides 

 to a lower level is a natural process in constant 

 operation retarded by one class of agencies, hastened 

 by another. A close cover of herbage reduces denuda- 

 tion to a mere trifle, and a forest shade, as nearly as 

 possible, puts a stop to it altogether. On the other 

 hand, if the natm-al shade be cleargd, and the land 

 planted mth anything that will not immediately 

 shade the whole sm-face, and, if the cultivated plant 

 is injiu-ed by the natiu-al gi-owth which all soils pro- 

 duce, you must either keep the latter imder subjection, 

 or allow yom- cultivated plant to suffer to an extent 

 that may seriously affect your own interests, and defeat 

 the end you have in view as the solo object of you 

 operations. 



' ' I w ish to deal as tenderly and as candidly as I can 

 with the lately revived theory, as old as coffee plant- 

 ing itself, and which was tested in the olden times 

 to the i-uui, final or temporaiy, of humheds of coffee 

 estates. It is very uatmal for those who have observed 

 the inevitable denudation of bare surfaces accelerated 

 by the means necessary to keep them so, to grasp at 

 any idea, that may promise to retard the process 

 but, before accepting a thick gi-owth of weed as 

 the proper remedy, there are certain questions 

 necessary to be asked and answered. Taking coffee for 

 my text, it may be asked is my soil rich enough at 

 this day, to yield a paying coffee crop, and a crop of 

 weeds sufficient to materially retard denudation, at the 

 same time? Forty years ago, ninety-nine out of every 

 hundi'ed coliee planters in Ceylon woukl have answered 

 this question with an unhesitating atfirmative: ten years later 

 88 



an equal proportion, would have replied with an equally 

 decisive negative. In the inteiwal, the system had been 

 tried everywhere, and everywhere the consequences were 

 disastrous. I know not, whether the price of coffee has 

 ever since that time fjillen so low as in 1847-50, but 

 the terrible result was on that occasion prepared by 

 weeds, and the then curent methods of treating them. 

 Almost a moiety of the coffee estates were abandoned ; 

 estates sold at mere nominal prices, such as the original 

 cost of the iron roof of the store, and some of those, 

 so disposed of, became under the new system, most 

 excellent aud highly remunerative properties and 

 continued so, till the advent of Hemlleia vaxtalnx 

 levelled aU distinctions and involved all the estates 

 in the island in disaster. Human ingenuity may 

 arrive at some plan of reducing the wasli on bare 

 inclines to a minimum, but it certaiidy wUl not be 

 by the gi-owing of weeds, where coffee is the cultivated 

 plant, for coffee of all the plants I am intimately 

 acquainted with most resents the presence of herbace- 

 ous grow th on the space its roots occupy. Other plants 

 may be more tolerant, but coffee in unmistakable 

 language bids its cultivator choose between itself and its 

 bitter foe, the weeds. Remember that coffee is essentially 

 a plant that ckaws its supplies of food from the close 

 neighbourhood of the surface, and that all herbaceous 

 plants do th(^ same. Therefore amid ten thousand gi'eedy 

 sucking mouths, all more at home than itself, the culti- 

 vated plant comes off' second best. Uuiy the weeds, 

 you say. Very good, but yom' land is satm-ated with 

 the seeds of your cherished weeds, and where will they 

 gi'ow so luxmiautly, as on the loose soU, with which 

 you have covered the remains of then- parents? To 

 cut down the weeds with reaping hooks is another 

 proposed system of dealing with the annual weeds. The 

 result of this method is that you will gradually tiu-n 

 yom' coffee field into a pastm'e and then the end is 

 near. The coffee plant, in tolerable soil, as our Ceylon 

 soils go, will tight a long battle, with annuals, period- 

 ically rooted out, but when grass covers its feeding 

 gxound it gives in at once — you have seen the last 

 of your coffee crojis, and a few yellow leaves will be 

 the sole reward of yom- labom-." 



NEW PRODUCTS IN THE WESTERN 

 PROVINCE OF CEYLON : 



PK0GRES.S OF Cocoa, Rubber, Lieeri.-v.n Coffee. 



The state of tlie cofl'ee fungus remains much the same 

 for the last two months, having done all the ill it 

 was permitted to do, between the end of August and 

 the end of October. The damage has been consider- 

 able, but not so great as I have seen elsewhere, 

 and the fact is fully proved, that the many \arieties 

 of Liberian coffee are liable to the pest in different 

 degrees, though none have the power of complete 

 resistance. 



Duruig the comparative calm weather, between 

 August and December, the cocoa made very encour- 

 aging progress, nor did it suffer much from the di-y. 

 weather gales that followed, but the terrible succes- 

 sion of bitter squalls, during the last week of the 

 year, has been very trying, more esjiecially to the 

 well-advanced trees ; the ends of the branches being 

 entirely stripped of leaves in many cases for a foot 

 down, while many of my largest trees have a sadly 

 ragged and forlorn look. There are a good many trees 

 coming into bearing, and in another year we may 

 look for an appreciable crop. The seed of the dark 

 red kind is now to be had at one rupee per hundred 

 pods, a price which is not in excess of the market 

 of Europe ; the Canaccas kinds are still however at 

 the okl price of twenty-five nipees, though they are 

 plentiful in the Heneratgoda gardens, and I fancy they 

 are not in vexy active demand. I would pr for to 

 jiropagate those varieties, but I grudge the |.iice, 



