Edible Products. 160 



evenly around it. The plants should be shaded with light bamboo-and-grass tatties 

 ulaced horizontally over each plot and supported upon bamboo uprights G ft. high. 

 This shade should be given directly the transplants are put out, and be maintained 

 for at least one year. The tatties may be removed when there is rain as well as 

 at night and in the cooler parts of the day. The plants should also be copiously 

 watered throughout the warmer months of the year for at least two years after 

 they are put out. 



The mangosteen plant has been known to bear fruit in the fifth year from 

 planting out or in the sixth from germination. At this age it ordinarily attains 

 to a height of 10 ft. and a basal girth of 1 ft., and its conical crown, which is formed 

 low on the bole, casts a cover of about 10 ft. in diameter. The yield of fruit varies 

 with locality as well as care in manuring and general cultivation ; but it usually 

 is small and continues to be poor until the plant reaches its tenth year. Again, 

 the earlier fruits are small and irregularly developed and contain very few pulpy 

 seeds. Thus, the number, size, shape and flavour of the fruit are improved only 

 with advancing years ; but, even in young crops, considerable improvement could 

 be effected by heavy periodic manuring and watering. A healthy plant in its tenth 

 year is capable of yielding from two to three hundred mangosteens valued at from 

 Rs. 3 to Rs. 5 per hundred. An acre stocked with plants standing at distances of 

 20 ft. from one another would hold at least 100 plants. And if, at the end of the 

 tenth year, they yield, on an average, 200 fruits each, valued at the rate of Rs. 4 per 

 hundred, the plantation would yield an approximate income of Rs. 800. The species 

 is well adapted for cultivation in all localities with heavy rainfall, a loamy soil, and 

 enjoying freedom from frost. It luxuriates in bright and vigorous sunshine and 

 demands plenty of light for its most perfect development. The soil, however, 

 should be moist and well-drained. It would appear to be Avell suited for economic 

 cultivation on the Malabar Coast, the low-lands of Ceylon, Assam, Lower Burma, as 

 well as in such other regions of the East as spontaneously support evergreen forests 

 of broad-leaved species. It is best grown as a pure crop, unmixed with species other 

 than itself. — Madras Mail. 



COCONUT CULTIVATION: MANURING. 



The manuring problem must be met and solved by the best resources at our 

 command. The writer has had pointed out hundreds of trees that, wholly guiltless 

 of any direct application of manure, have borne excellent crops for many successive 

 years ; but he has also seen hundreds of others in their very prime, at thirty years, 

 which once produced a hundred select nuts per year, now producing fluctuating and 

 uncertain crops of fifteen to thirty inferior fruits. Time and again native growers 

 have told me of the large and uniformly continuous crops of nuts from the trees 

 immediately overshadowing their dwellings, and, although some have attributed 

 this to a sentimental appreciation and gratitude on the part of the palm at being 

 made one of the family of the owner, a few were sensible enough to realize that it 

 came of the opportunity that those particular trees had to get the manurial benefit 

 of the household sewage and waste. Yet, the lesson is still unlearned and, after 

 much dilligent inquiry, I have yet to find a nut grower in the Philippines who at any 

 time (except at planting) makes direct and systematic application of manure to his 

 trees. In India, Ceylon, the Penang Peninsula, and Cochin China, where the tree 

 has been cultivated for generations, the most that was ever attempted until very 

 recently was to throw a little manure in the hole where the tree was planted, and 

 for all future time to depend on the inferior, grass-made droppings of a few cattle 

 tethered among the trees, to compensate for the half million or more nuts that 

 a hectare of fairly productive trees should yield during their normal bearing life. 



