XI 
CAPSICUMS 
369 
manure, which is freely used on the vegetables and 
other garden produce. 
Manure must only be given in the afternoon at four 
or five o’clock. To the habit of giving manure at mid- 
day when it is hottest, or to giving manure too strong 
and unmixed with water, he attributes the rotting of 
the chili fruits before they are ripe. 
This rotting of the fruits, I presume, is really the 
destruction of the fruits by Gloeosporium, or other 
fungus diseases. It is always an understood thing that 
liquid manure, and indeed pure water, should not be 
given to a plant in full sun during the hot part of the 
day in the tropics. All applications of liquids or water- 
ing should be given to the plant either in the early 
morning or, by preference, in the evening not long 
before sundown. Possibly, in the case of liquid manure, 
the absorption during the day is too rapid, and the 
diluted manure has the same effect as undiluted 
administered later in the day. 
Of course, the administration of too strong manure 
does not actually directly produce the fungus, but it 
probably so far weakens the plant that it is readily 
affected by it. Over-manured plants of any kind are 
apt to show the results in the pale yellow colouring of 
the leaves, quite similar to that caused by starvation or 
disease of the roots. 
In Singapore the price fluctuates from 15 cents to 
90 cents a catty. The latter price is very high, and is 
said to be caused by a scarcity due to the heavy and 
continuous rains. 
When the crop is very abundant and the capsicums 
are cheap, the fruit that is unsold is dried on mats in 
the sun, but no regular drying system is in vogue, nor 
is there any attempt to make cayenne pepper. The 
capsicums are very extensively used fresh with the rice 
and dried fish which forms the ordinary native food. 
Dried capsicums, however, are imported very extensively 
from India. Natives say that the locally dried capsicum 
has not the flavour of the dried Indian fruit. It is 
2 B 
