B18 THE TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST. [Feb. 1, 1900. 
•vil and one diflSoult to check. The shamba people 
are as bad as, if not worse than, the outsiders and 
■eem to have been trained npon careless and 
destructive principles. To be too strict in the mat- 
ter is to ran the risk of your wageni pickers desert- 
ing to other shambas where they will not be molested. 
It is the buds upon the tops and the lateral ex- 
tremities of the boughs that are so difficult to reach, 
and at Machni we were compelled to leave those. 
At Dnnga where we had sufficient labour to keep 
half a dozen Udders going we did not succeed in 
thoroughly clearing the trees. Three men working 
one ladder will bring in 6 pishi a day ; it would 
therefore have been unprofitable to have diverted 
the labour, where it was scarce as at Machui, from 
the accessible buds to the ladders where three men 
could only pick the equivalent of one. 
Another fruitful sourco of trouble is the ravages of 
the maji moto ants, which weave their nests in the 
branches and are sometimes so bad that pickers 
cannot climb the trees till they have first smoked 
them out by lighting a fire underneath. When this 
takes place the lower branches of the trees are fre- 
quently singed and the trees sometimes fired alto- 
g ether. The ravages of maji moto ants can be kept under 
y weeding. Well-weeded shambas are seldom 
troubled much with ants. 
Experimental drying of the Cloves at Dunqa. — Both 
Mr. Robertson and myself have given a good deal 
of attention to clove drying. We studied the Arab 
methods and found that they almost invariably 
heaped up their green cloves in the godown the first 
night after they are picked. If the weather is showery, 
preventing drying, the heaps remain for several days, 
growing larger with each day's picking. Fermenta- 
tion is in this way set up, the cloves emerging a rich 
brown colour. It occurred to us that as this colour 
approached the rich tan colour so desirable in the 
dried clove that a properly controlled system of fer- 
mentation might be beneficial. But our experiments 
■bowed this idea to be erroneous ; cloves should be 
spread out immediately npon being measured in ; 
beated clovea turn black. We trained our people to 
separate the burst from the good buds while stelking. 
It can be done at this time with little trouble and with 
no extra cost, but the invariable custom is to let 
good and bad all go in together. Before finally 
sanding to market we passed the cloves through a 
riddle to remove the small immature buds. By these 
means, which is only the old story of attention to 
detail, we produced what, for Zanzibar, was a fairly 
ood sample, though falling short in the size of the 
ads. This was a defect which we could not remedy 
moat of the cloves this year have been small. 
Practically no difference is made in the local 
market between good and ordinary, so I was induced 
to send a small trial lot of 140 fraslas to be sold separ- 
ately in London, to test the value of our work. Early 
in the year I had sent home to Messrs. Gray, Dawes 
& Co. an experimental sample of cloves that had 
been dried last season, and Mr. Hugh Garden of 
that firm reported on them as follows : — 
" As regards the cloves this is of course the finest 
sample of Zanzibar ever shown, and buyers who saw it 
Talued it at seven-pence to eight-pence. There is still 
a considerable difierenoe between this and Fenang 
which, somehow, appear to retain their reddish brown 
colour. A very fine sample was bought in at auc- 
tion at eleven-pence or eleven-pence half-penny, and 
was being held for one shilling. The market appar- 
ently makes the same difference between Penang and 
your sample — in value — as between your sample and 
ordinary fair Zanzibar, but this too you must under- 
stand is only for very limited quantities. " 
These cloves were dried under glass after having 
been specially picked. More depends upon the pick- 
ing than upon the drying. It is impossible for us here 
to pick the buds singly because of the quantity to 
handle ; they must be picked in bunches, as they 
grow, and the small and over-ripe buds sorted QUt 
Mter wards, 
In order to test the efficacy of glass we erected 
small house 30 feet long and 14 feet wide with galvan- 
ised iron walls and a glass roof. The heat of the 
sun was iu this way increased 25° beyond what it 
was in the open air. This increased temperature did 
not hasten the drying process so much as we ex- 
pected unless the clovea were first raised upon shelves. 
The heated air was then able to act from below 
and above, and cloves could be dried in two days in 
cloudy weather with only short intervals of sunshine. 
All our cloves were finished off iu the glass house. 
I don't think that the elevated temperatuie to which 
they were exposed contributed so much to the im- 
provement in quality as the sorting and riddling. 
We shall try and arrange next year a system of 
shelves to increase the drying area of the clove house. 
Our experiments have, however, shown that cloves 
must be exposed to the direct heat and light of the 
sun; if dried in the shade they turn black. 
The glass house has been the means of saving labour 
as the cloves, once spread out in it, could be left to 
dry. Much time is lost, at a time when every avail- 
able man is required for picking, under the present 
system of taking the mats in and out morning and 
evening and in showery weather. At Marseilles 
this became moat serious as we had between four 
and five hundred mats to handle each time. 
The Clove Crop generally. — The magnitude of the 
clove crop may be judged by the returns for Novem- 
her and December. In those monihs Pemba sent in 
more cloves than in any previous month of the years 
tabulated, while the total for the two islands for Decem- 
ber, namely 121, 858 fras. exceeds all previous returns. 
The Zanzibar crop was late, hence the total of 60,365 
fras. for the year ia the lowest since 18911, though the 
ports for December, namely 32,399 fras., is the highest 
on record for Zanzibar in one mouth. Still a heavy loss 
has taken place upon the trees. The dry weather of 
December, the rainfall for which was the lowest on 
record, following upon an unusually dry year, caused 
the trees, especially in the districts where the crop 
was very late — Dunga, Kitumba and the north end 
of the island — to shed starved and immature buds, 
and labour was diverted from picking to sweeping 
up the fallen clovea under the trees. A quantity has 
been gathered in this way though a far greater quan- 
tity has been lost. Picking in these districts never 
really got into full swing. 
In the Machui district the crop was abundant and 
well forward, but the labour was totally inadequate to 
cope with it. The trees look as heavily laden now 
with ripening mother of cloves as they did in the 
beginning of the season with buds, and the proportion 
picked must be quite insignificant to that which ia 
left. In the South Mwera country the crop was earlier 
and lighter and was comparatively well gathered. 
Pemba seems to have suffered less from the effects of 
the drought than Zanzibar. The soil of Pemba, having 
more clay than ours, is more retentive of moisture, 
and therefore better able to resist the effects of 
drought. The Pemba trees, too, are older and their 
roots will consequently have reached deeper levels for 
their food supply. 
III. COCONUTS. 
The Dunga trees yield about 30 nuts per year, and 
the Machui, which are older, 40 nuts. Gathering has 
coat with us about 4 rupees per thousand nuts, and 
the nuts can be sold on the spot for from 20 to 22 
rupees per 1,000 ; there is therefore a profit of say 
R17 per 1,000. Now a thousand nuts are the product 
of 33 trees, at 30 nuts per tree. Trees are nlanted 
35 feet apart which is 35 trees to the acre. Soughly 
then we may take it that 1,000 nuts are the produce 
of an acre of land and give a net return of B17 
(£l-2-8) per acre of halt a rupee per tree. There 
are no other outgoings to be charged to coconuts as 
the trees are not cultivated in Zanzibar. Mr. Last 
has more than trebled the yield of his trees at 
Mangapwani, which he attributes to having dug the 
ground round them. We find at Dunga that digging 
and mulching with grass can be done for about 3 
