The gardens proper may be a short distance from the villages, or they may be three or four miles away. The people begin by hoeing the land close to their dwellings; when the soil is exhausted, they move farther out, and so on, from year to year. When the gardens come to be inconveniently far away, the village is moved; and thus the population is continually shifting from place to place, and one sometimes finds sites of old gardens in what one had thought was untouched bush. When a man has selected a site for a new garden, he marks the place, and bespeaks, or as the natives say, ‘betroths’ the ground, by tying some bunches of grass into knots, or, if there are trees on the spot, twisting some grass round their trunks. He is perfectly free to choose, so long as the land is not in cultivation, or has not been bespoken by some one else; and, once marked, no one can interfere with it. The grass is then burnt off at the end of the dry season, and with the rains, in November, or the early part of December, the hoeing begins. Where there are bits of alluvial soil close to a watercourse, which are either kept moist by the stream or can be easily irrigated, maize is sown during the dry season, so as to be gathered green early in the year when no other is to be had. Some people break up the ground for their gardens during the winter or dry season, but the earth is then very hard, and most consider that it is no use doing so till after the rains have begun. If the garden is a new one, the ashes of the burnt grass (or the grass itself, if any has sprung up before the hoeing begins) are hoed into the soil for manure; if maize was grown in it the previous year, the dry stalks are carefully burnt for the same purpose.