Gold, Sport, and Coffee Planting in Mysore: With chapters on coffee planting in Coorg, the Mysore representative assembly, the Indian congress, caste and the Indian silver question, being the 38 years' experiences of a Mysore planterElliot, Robert H. (Robert Henry)
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Gold, Sport, and Coffee Planting in Mysore: With chapters on coffee planting in Coorg, the Mysore representative assembly, the Indian congress, caste and the Indian silver question, being the 38 years' experiences of a Mysore planter
Elliot, Robert H. (Robert Henry)
Caste -- India; Coffee; Karnataka (India) -- Description and travel; Karnataka (India) -- Politics and government
The subsequent treatment of the shade trees is of great importance. Their
lower branches in the early years of their growth are commonly thin and
weakly, and thus, of course, droop close over the coffee, and often touch
it. Then the inexperienced shade tree grower begins to lop off the lower
branches, with the result that he injures and bleeds the young tree, and
deprives it of the nutriment it would otherwise derive from its full
allowance of foliage. Some carry this trimming up to a very injurious
extent, and the result is that they grow young trees with long stems and
poor foliage, and a narrow spread of branches, and thus require many more
trees in the land than they would if they exercised a little more patience
at first. But if the tree is only left alone the evil of branches drooping
downwards on to the coffee will soon disappear, as these branches will not
only rise with the rising stem, but will thicken and grow upwards, instead
of drooping as they did when young and weakly. And some planters, I
observe, are by no means satisfied with lopping the lower boughs, but trim
off branches fifteen feet from the ground. Under such a system the number
of shade trees required is enormous, and the evils arising from the
number of boles with their vast mass of large roots will only be the more
severely apparent as time advances. By one shade planter in Coorg I have
been told that coffee there has already been suffering much from the
quantity of boles and tree roots in the land, in consequence of the
trimming up system and the quantity of trees required in consequence. It
should also be remembered that we require our shade not only to protect
our coffee from the sun's rays, but to shield it from those parching winds
which sweep across the arid plains of the interior of India, and to
prevent the drying up of the land. And is it not perfectly obvious that if
we trim up the trees so as to produce a long stem with a small crown, the
parching winds will sweep unchecked over plants and soil? There is,
however, the usual proverbial exception, and that is in the case of trees
growing near the bottoms of ravines with steep sides to them, and where
you often want a drawn up stem and crown to cast a shadow on to a hot
western or southern bank, and in such cases, of course, trimming up is
necessary. Having thus discussed the planting of coffee where the forest
has been cut wholly down and burnt, we will now turn to planting under the
shade of the original forest trees.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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