COFFEA 



TILLAGE ABABICA 



Cultivation 



it when -lopes are not too great ami tin- soil fairly light, bunding is a Bund*. 



method, superior to even trenching or terracing. Instead of cutting 

 a terrace, a bank of soil is laid across the slope, and the rain thus 

 le tq wasli this into a natural wide terrace. In many parts of the 

 \ bamboos and prunings are used to form fan-like structures upon 

 lich the siltin^-up process may be encouraged. 



Dicing and Mulching. Lehmann (Bull. Dept. Agri. Mysore, 1902, ii.) Digging. 

 vei v properly pointed out that coffee is so very different from the 

 ijority of the plants cultivated in Europe and America, that it does not 

 necessity follow that approved Western methods are in every detail 

 iplinvble to it. "For one thing," he observes, "coffee thrives under 

 shade of large trees, while in Europe, or at any rate in Canada, the 

 hivated crops invariably suffer near trees of any sort." He accordingly 

 j;e8 that under the climatic conditions and on the soils that prevail in 

 sre, it is essential that knowledge of coffee cultivation should be ac- 

 hy direct experiment rather than deduced from general agricultural 

 ineiples. And in that opinion he is assuredly correct. Coffee is as 

 sitive, Lehmann tells us, as most plants to the injuries caused by 

 ing or baking of the soil. In Mysore, he continues, most so'ils after caking the soil 



dug and then exposed to heavy rain, followed by bright sunshine, 

 >me quite as hard on the surface as they were before having been dug. 

 surely that peculiarity is experienced throughout the world, and on 

 pure sands of the deserts of Rajputana as much so as on the rich loams 

 Northern Europe or the coffee lands of Mysore, wherever rainfall is 

 lowed by bright sunshine. It is to check the parching and caking action Parching, 

 the sun that gardeners mulch or litter certain crops as a temporary 

 sure. It is with the same object in view that weeding at the commence- 

 of the hot months is discouraged by the cultivators of most tropical 

 juntries. Cameron points out that the annual weed " Blumea " 

 I f/cratnin i-oni/zoiifrx) seen in established plantations can do compara- 

 little harm and that a light covering of weeds might even do good by 

 jventing the surface becoming overheated. To guard against severe 

 ing and overdrying of the soil is a legitimate and rational aspect of all 

 riculture. But to advance from that position to the condemnation of 

 ige and the rejection of the fully demonstrated fact that the breaking-up 

 the surface soil and its exposure to the action of heat, light, air and water 

 the effect of reducing non-soluble to soluble compounds and the 

 luction thereby of plant food, seems utterly unwarrantable. The pro- 

 jtion of the soil against surface wash and surface caking by a natural 

 ter of leaves (mulching) is very admirable and may be very useful as 

 occasional process of fallowing, but to expect that any lands, however 

 irably drained, weeded and mulched, could continue indefinitely to 

 coffee or any other crop without tillage or manure, is to carry a 

 itural law to a perilous and unjustifiable extreme. Lehmann, by his 

 idies of the manures of coffee, has shown that he "never contemplated 

 recommendations for mulching to be the one and only method of 

 itment of the soil that was desirable. It would indeed be an un- 

 irrantable assumption to affirm that what may be true with a wild plant 

 lust be true universally with the same plant under the abnormal demands 

 cultivation. It is beside the issue to say that mulching has actually 

 sn the system with a group of coffee gardens in Coorg for many years 

 Madras Weekly Mail, March 20, 1902). It mightjfairly be, and in fact Soil Exhaustion. 



377 



Mulching. 



Tillage 



indispensable. 



Influences of 

 Manures. 



