Edible Products, 



52 



however, hopes to propagate some acclimatised plants by training the branches 

 down to the earth and covering little lengths of them with sand, and by 

 ringing round the stems and binding moss on them. The vine grown in the 

 wall inside the yard by the house is not doing so well as the one referred to, 

 which was imported at the same time. 



Mr. Cotton is of the opinion that no fruit can be grown to pay in Nuwara 

 Eliya, excepting the cooking pear. The three Kentish Fill-basket apple trees, 

 which had a few fruits on them last September, were pruned— and for the 

 first time their roots were dug round and pruned, with the result that the trees 

 had twenty well-set fruit, but the frost has reduced the number to twelve. 

 Fruits come on at the wrong time of the year in Nuwara Eliya. The Red Heart 

 plums yield bushels of fruit from May to August, but they get cracked by 

 the winds, and the rains rot the fruit before it gets a chance to ripen. My 

 attention was called, however, to a Avell-grown bush of the Emperor of China 

 Mandarin Orange, barely five years old, not quite li feet high, but quite five 

 to six feet in circumference round the bush, on which were some twenty fruits, 

 some of them of the size of a small coconut. Mr. Cotton had picked a good 

 many of them beside those on the tree. 



One drawback to orange culture at Nuwara Eliya was that the 

 skin and rind of the fruits was too thick— those of the fruit referred 

 were quite half-an-inch thick. A certain Nuwara Eliya orange grower held 

 the opinion that the skin and rind would get thinner and thinner every year, 

 but Mr. Cotton said, if that did happen at all, it would take 10 to 12 years 

 from the time the trees began to bear. At Mr. A. W. A. Plate's orchard, 

 behind his studio, I was shown a beautifully-grown Washington navel orange 

 tree laden with over fifty fruit. The tree was the result of a bud from the 

 Scrubs Estate, grafted by Mr. Plate himself to a stock of the common Ceylon 

 citron. Mr. Plate's system with regard to all fruit trees is to constantly 

 prune their centre branches, in order to get the sun to play into the very heart 

 of the tree. The orange tree, in question, had about eight to twelve outer branches, 

 drawn out and tied to stakes, resembling an open umbrella. The same was 

 done with his Red Heart Plums. Mr. Plate holds that all fruit trees in Ceylon 

 produce too much Avood which should be lopped and pruned so as to let the 

 sun harden up the branches on which the fruit are to be produced. The system 

 is open to criticism, but the results he has obtained justify his adopting it. 

 His orchard has twelve other imported Washington Navel orange plants, a number 

 of Red Heart plums and imported fig plants. Of two dozen orange plants he 

 had got out through Messrs. Thompson, Thomas & Co., about a year ago, he 

 had given a dozen to the Grand Hotel. This variety of orange is much smaller 

 than that of the Emperor of China Mandarin, but has evidently a thinner 

 skin. I was also shown a moderate-sized glass-house in which Mr. Plate intends 

 to grow Hamburg grapes.— Ceylon Observer. 



SORTING AND GRADING OF TEAS FOR THE COLOMBO MARKET. 

 Some years ago teas were generally sorted into three grades, viz., broken 

 pekoe, pekoe, and pekoe souchong. Under modern conditions, however, this grading 

 is very l^arely employed, and there now is a considerable tendency to eliminate 

 the last-mentioned grade almost entirely from the factory output. At the present 

 time teas are usually sorted into at most five grades,, if Ave exclude dust and 

 fannings from the reckoning. There is no question but that the more grades, 

 up to tour or five in number, manufactured, the truer the bortiug of the leaf 



