All About Coffee - William H. Ukers (best novel books to read .TXT) 📗

The early days of coffee culture in Abyssinia and Arabia—Coffee cultivation in general—Soil, climate, rainfall, altitude, propagation, preparing the plantation, shade and wind breaks, fertilizing, pruning, catch crops, pests, and diseases—How coffee is grown around the world—Cultivation in all the principal producing countries

For the beginnings of coffee culture we must go back to the Arabian colony of Harar in Abyssinia, for here it was, about the fifteenth century, that the Arabs, having found the plant growing wild in the Abyssinian highlands, first gave it intensive cultivation. The complete story of the early cultivation of coffee in the old and new worlds is told in chapter II, which deals with the history of the propagation of the coffee plant.

La Roque[314] was the first to tell how the plant was cultivated and the berries prepared for market in Arabia, where it was brought from Abyssinia.

The Arabs raised it from seed grown in nurseries, transplanting it to plantations laid out in the foot-hills of the mountains, to which they conducted the mountain streams by ingeniously constructed small channels to water the roots. They built trenches three feet wide and five feet deep, lining them with pebbles to cause the water to sink deep into the earth with which the trenches were filled, to preserve the moisture from too rapid evaporation. These were so constructed that the water could be turned off into other channels when the fruit began to ripen. In plantations exposed to the south, a kind of poplar tree was planted along the trenches to supply needful shade.

La Roque noted that the coffee trees in Yemen were planted in lines, like the apple trees in Normandy; and that when they were much exposed to the sun, the shade poplars were regularly introduced between the rows.

Such cultivation as the plant received in early Abyssinia and Arabia was crude and primitive at best. Throughout the intervening centuries, there has been little improvement in Yemen; but modern cultural methods obtain in the Harar district in Abyssinia.

Like the Arabs in Yemen, the Harari cultivated in small gardens, employing the same ingenious system of irrigation from mountain springs to water the roots of the plants at least once a week during the dry season. In Yemen and in Abyssinia the ripened berries were sun-dried on beaten-earth barbecues.

The European planters who carried the cultivation of the bean to the Far East and to America followed the best Arabian practise, changing, and sometimes improving it, in order to adapt it to local conditions.

Coffee Cultivation in General

Today the commercial growers of coffee on a large scale practise intensive cultivation methods, giving the same care to preparing their plantations and maintaining their trees as do other growers of grains and fruits. As in the more advanced methods of arboriculture, every effort is made to obtain the maximum production of quality coffee consistent with the smallest outlay of money and labor. Experimental stations in various parts of the world are constantly working to improve methods and products, and to develop types that will resist disease and adverse climatic conditions.

While cultivation methods in the different producing countries vary in detail of practise, the principles are unchanging. Where methods do differ, it is owing principally to local economic conditions, such as the supply and cost of labor, machinery, fertilizers, and similar essential factors.