METHOD OF CROPPING. 421 



quality of the produce suffer. At this time the plants, 

 under favourable conditions of cultivation, should average 

 8 to 9 inches in height; the leaves should be succulent, 

 and of a good green colour. The mode of cropping or 

 harvesting is both tedious and costly ; the leaves are pulled 

 off separately, by a peculiar twist of the hand, from the 

 stem of each plant-, which is left uninjured to produce a 

 second crop of leaves. The plucked leaves are placed in 

 small baskets or "skips/' carried by the workers; these 

 are from time to time emptied into larger ones, in which 

 the producers removed from the field to the building, where 

 the subsequent preparation they undergo to fit them for 

 market is carried out. The whole operation of crop- 

 ping is performed by the workers on their knees. The 

 greatest care is required that no weeds should be mixed 

 with the leaves, and that they should be sound and quite 

 free from grit or m dirt, as the mixture of any foreign 

 matter deteriorates the sample. After the crop has been 

 all pulled the ground is well stirred between the rows, 

 the weeds destroyed, and the workers moved on to the 

 next-sown portion of the field, which by this time should 

 also be ready for harvesting, where the same operations 

 are carried out, and the stripped plants left to continue 

 their growth, and replace the leaves of which they have 

 been deprived. In about six weeks from the time of 

 stripping, the plants are again ready for cropping ; and 

 this is in some cases performed a third time the produce 

 decreasing at each repetition, the third rarely yielding 

 more than half the produce of the first. Indeed, some 

 prefer merely to take the finest portions at the last crop- 

 ping, leaving the remainder to be fed off by sheep, which 

 eat it readily enough, especially as the frosty mornings 

 prevalent at that season of the year deprive the stems 

 and leaves of the bitterness they otherwise possess. 



The cultivation of the crop the second year is exactly 



