Edible Products. 



58 



Owing to the very expensive character of manuring and to its very partial 

 success at that time, it became the rule in many districts to make up for the annual 

 deterioration of the older tea by planting new areas every year. Thus it was 

 often the case that five or even ten per cent of the existing area was put out 

 in new plant each year, with the idea that as soon as the new tea came into 

 bearing, a corresponding area of old cultivation should be abandoned and allowed 

 to revert to its original jungle. Sometimes the abandonment was carried out; 

 sometimes, and often, the old cultivation was still retained in the area of 

 bearing tea. The former, while agriculturally a disgraceful process resembling 

 the jhuming system of the Indian hill tribes, was commercially sound; the 

 latter, in constantly increasing the area under cultivation while the yield did 

 not increase or only increased in a smaller ratio, was both agriculturally and 

 commercially unsound. That this is the case is sufficiently obvious with the 

 least thought. There is a constantly increasing area, demanding a constantly 

 augmenting labour force both for cultivating the land and plucking the crop, 

 and a crop not increasing in the same proportion, and hence costing more per 

 pound each year. The result has been, ultimately, a crisis in many gardens, 

 and the method is now almost entirely a discredited one. 



While such methods of counteracting the deteriorating effect of age iu 

 tea gardens and tea bushes were being used, the discovery was made that bushes, 

 which had gone very far below their original condition could be brought again 

 into vigorous yielding condition by 'heavy pruning.' By this type of pruning 

 is meant any system which involves cutting out entirely the growth of shoots 

 made in the current year, and so leaving on the bush only wood more than one year 

 old. The tea bush has a marvellous power of throwing out new shoots at apparently 

 almost any point of the old wood on the plant, so that when all the younger 

 wood is cut out, new shoots make their appearance from the older growth, 

 and provided the soil is in a satisfactory condition and not exhausted this 

 growth arising from the older wood shows greater size and vigour than that 

 produced on the younger shoots only grown during the previous season. The 

 advantage of this was quickly seen. By periodical ' heavy prunings ' it seemed 

 as if it would be possible to keep old bushes in full vigour indefinitely. The 

 ' heavy pruning' conducted under the influence of this idea became, 'year by year" 

 heavier and heavier, and until in the early nineties (1890-1895,) it became 

 fashionable in Upper Assam actually to cut down to the ground any tea which 

 had deteriorated in yield, and allow new shoots to come from the ' collar ' of the 

 plant or even below. This was called 'collar pruning.' Advantageous and even 

 necessary as such treatment was in many cases, the system just described took 

 a far too great extension. Hundreds of acres were collar-pruned when the tea 

 was suffering from causes for which collar pruning was no remedy, and it was 

 hardly recognised enough that such drastic treatment should only be adopted as an 

 extreme, and then only when quite evident that the deterioration was due to 

 something for which collar pruning is a remedy. 



The present state of the subject is then somewhat as follows. The old tea 

 throughout the Indian tea districts in North-East India has mostly declined or is 

 declining in value. There is comparatively little plant more than thirty years old 

 which does not show this decline ; and much, the age of which only little exceeds 

 twenty years, is in the same case. The older system of abandonment of the old 

 areas and planting out new to correspond, cannot in many cases now go on owing 

 to the lack of available land, and the essentially wasteful character of the method 

 is becoming more and more realised. The planting of additional areas in a garden 

 to make up for the decline of the old tea has been generally recognised as being 



