282 THE BOOK OF USEFUL PLANTS 



The beauty of these little trees you will remark 

 as they stand under the shade of the nurse trees, 

 with which young orchards are usually set. But 

 wait till you go over into a tract of three-year-old 

 plants. The white flowers shine like stars, and 

 breathe a sweet fragrance. They appear at the . 

 axils of the leaves, where they are not at all 

 numerous, but quite large. This is their first 

 bloom. Three times a year, from this time for- 

 ward, the plant blooms, the flowers followed by 

 fruit that takes eight months to mature. This is 

 why the older bushes have both flowers and fruit 

 in the same cluster, apparently. 



Light crops are borne by coffee plants up to 

 the sixth year, when the normal habit of bearing 

 is reached, and a pound of dried berries are ex- 

 pected as the yield of the average tree. The 

 berries ripen unevenly, so the crop is picked by 

 hand, and very carefully, so as not to injure the 

 berries that are coming on. The harvest time 

 lasts four months. The picking 'costs #1.20 to 

 $1.40 per hundredweight of berries in Porto Rico. 

 Whole families turn into the fields at the coffee 

 harvest, and it is as jolly a season as cotton- 

 picking time in the Southern States, and the 

 hop-gathering in New York State. The West 

 Indian negro works for the munificent sum of 



