CLEANIN03. 465 



realised. Besides this immense advantage which it offers, it also 

 demands less labour, supervision and skill than the process of 

 thinning out the crop everywhere. But it will have its place main- 

 ly in crops composed for the most part of shade-enduring indivi- 

 duals. 



OPEN CROP. Young saplings not sufficiently protected by trees 

 overhead, especially in poor soils or in one that has deteriorated at 

 the surface, often get arrested in their growth for years and sicken 

 and remain smothered up in the midst of a dense thicket of master- 

 ful shrubs and undershrubs. The remedy to adopt is to fill up the 

 young crop with some quick-growing and hardy species possessing 

 a light cover, thereby enabling it to close over the ground rapidly 

 and suppress the noxious vegetation. The introduced individuals 

 will mostly be required only temporarily as nurses, until the main 

 elements of the crop have acquired vigour and grown sufficiently 

 to form a more or less complete leaf-canopy by themselves. Some- 

 times indeed they may be valuable enough to be admitted per- 

 manently into the crop. The young nurses may of course, if 

 uncommon foresight has been exercised, be raised contemporaneous- 

 ly with the crop requiring their aid ; but it is usual to introduce 

 them later, occasionally by sowing directly, more often by plant- 

 ing. In the latter case, the transplants are generally put out in 

 lines rather far apart, sometimes in an irregular manner in the 

 midst of the seedlings to be nursed. When sowing is resorted to, 

 the nurse species should be sown either in lines alternating with 

 the others, or mixed with them indiscriminately if the entire crop 

 has been raised artificially, or in broken lines or plots in the 

 midst of self sown-seedlings. 



SECTION II. 

 Cleanings . 



Cleanings are operations by means of which all the hurtful and 

 otherwise undesirable elements are weeded out in a timely man- 

 ner. It is seldom that a single operation suffices, for in no place 

 must the leaf-canopy be ever opened out too much. Annual re- 

 petition would of course be the best thing in the interests of the 

 crop, but such frequency is obviously out of the question and the 

 only practical plan is to repeat the operation at fixed intervals, the 

 length of which will depend on the rapidity of growth of the 

 young plants. 



The hurtful elements to be removed in each operation are 



