September, 1909.] 



205 



Saps and Exudations. 



Then all this cleared stuff must be piled 

 into vast bonfires and burnt, a proceed- 

 ing which when a belt of thorn is being 

 negotiated is most trying to the temper 

 and calls for an immense expenditure of 

 matches. Of course, if one could wait 

 till September to burn the refuse, it 

 would then all go in grass fires, but alas ! 

 this course is impossible, and our grass 

 being of the most stubborn type utterly 

 declines to burn early in the season. 

 Behind the cleaners the ground must be 

 got ready for the " marker out " at this 

 time, quite the most important person 

 on the estate, and in one case a Many- 

 erna from Tanganyika way with that 

 possession most rare in the native— a 

 straight eye— attended by three satel- 

 lites one at each end of a wire fifty yards 

 long, and one acting as feeder with an 

 armful of pegs, he meanders about check- 

 ing angles and squaring corners, and 

 behind him stretches an ever-increasing 

 vista of neat rows 12 feet by 6 feet to 

 mark the ultimate resting places of the 

 rubber trees, some of which will be 

 " permanent " plantation at 12 feet and 

 the rest tapped to death in two years 

 or so. 



Attached to the "marker out" is a 

 small force of five or six boys who sit in a 

 shady bit of forest near at hand ever- 

 lastingly cutting and sharpening pegs. 

 The way is prepared for him behind the 

 cleauers by a gang with jembies who cut 

 through the grass roots and skin the 

 land ; this, by the way, being one of the 

 most tiresome and slow of all the steps 

 in the making of a shumba. While all 

 this is going on, there are the seed beds 

 to be looked to, and they are quite as 

 important as anything else. Seeds do 

 not germinate nor young trees grow as 

 well as one could wish in the cold season, 

 and yet from 50,000 to 100,000 seedlings 

 must be got ready against the rains. 

 For all one can do the loss is heavy owing 

 to sun, rats and other causes, and not 

 every seed that germinates sees the 

 shamba ; but with fair luck October is 

 reached with a good shamba ready and 

 plenty of young trees waiting to be 

 planted, and then comes a pause in the 

 general activity while every one waits 

 in ill-concealed anxiety for the rain. 

 Will it come up to time (October 30th is 

 the day with us) or not ; so much hangs 

 on that, a week more or less in the 

 length of the rains makes such a dif- 

 ference. This year happily it did come 

 on the fateful 30th, next morning there 

 is a rush to the raingauge. An inch or 

 over is enough to risk planting out. If 

 the inch is passed one's energy is porten- 

 tous ; before breakfast the seed beds 

 must be visited and seedlings got up 

 by the thousand. Every available boy 



plants furiously till dark, while a stream 

 of porters passes to and fro from the 

 river to the shamba (now over a mile 

 and a half) with bundle after bundle of 

 trees. Our aim is to get in 10,000 trees 

 in one day, and once we achieved it, the 

 luckless partner whose fate it is to count 

 the plants gets a backache that lasts a 

 week. After this another lull and more 

 waiting for rain, and so onwards till the 

 rains are over any time between the 

 middle of December and the middle of 

 January. Then comes the cleaning of 

 the shambas. Everything becomes en- 

 gulfed in a sea of grass, creeper and 

 bitter apple, and the young trees are 

 simply swamped. Cleaning some 250 

 acres I may point out is not done in a 

 day, and until March it is a race to get it 

 finished. Only the grass up the lines of 

 trees is cleared, but that alone is more 

 than enough. In March come rains 

 again, and all the misses in the shambas 

 are planted up and every effort made 

 to keep down the grass, and before there 

 is time to think of it, it is May once more. 

 Take it all round a fairly strenuous year. 



Just a word on the enemies one has 

 to fight as I have done. Happily they 

 are not many, but what they are are 

 serious. First, is the grass. The more you 

 remove it, the more it seems to grow, 

 and if the trees are not kept free they 

 do not take long to make their dissatis- 

 faction evident. Second, come the rats 

 in the seed beds. They have a parti- 

 cular liking for a freshly burst seed and 

 take such heavy toll that it is neces- 

 sary to plant vastly more than you need 

 to plant out. Third, are the small buck 

 who nip off the tips of the young trees 

 scon after they have sprouted after 

 being cut back on planting out. They 

 do not destroy the tree, but they delay 

 the growth just at a time when every 

 moment is of value and are a great and 

 most exasperating nuisance. Fourth, 

 last and worst are the porcupines. 

 There is nothing a porcupine likes so 

 much as the bulbous root of a young 

 tree, and when we first started planting, 

 we were horrified to find our trees 

 destroyed by hundreds every night. 

 The porcupine digs them up, one by one 

 in the rows and eats the roots leaving 

 the rest to wither. But luckily a low, 

 wide meshed wire fence is a sufficient bar 

 to his depredations, and we now enclose 

 each new shamba before a tree is planted 

 therein. On the whole I think we have 

 reason to be thankful that our enemies 

 are not worse. 



I have not mentioned wild pigs, as 

 though I believe they are tioublesome at 

 the coast, they have not as yet touched 

 any trees up here. 



