Rubber in the East Author:J. C. Willis General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1906 Original Publisher: Cottle Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select f... more »rom more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER IV. CATCH CROPS FOR RUBBER PLANTATIONS. E may now pass on to give the lectures dealing with the various catch crops possible upon rubber plantations, premising that of course those given here do not exhaust the list. In particular, attention must be directed to the fact that there are many catch crops of what may be called a permanent nature, such as cacao, camphor, tea, and other long-lived plants. If such catch crops as these -- if they can be called catch crops -- are to be planted between the rubber, it is evident that the latter will have to be planted further apart than in the first chapter of these lectures we considered necessary. But in this place we need only deal with catch crops in the sense that they are crops to be taken from between the rubber for periods varying from one to six or seven years, according to the crop chosen and the distance a part that the rubber is planted. Of such crops, for general use, probably the most profitable are in the dry country cotton and tobacco, in the wet country lemongrass, citronella, tapioca. In addition to these, we must not forget that many people prefer, instead of growing any actually cash-payment crop, to cultivate green manures between their rubber, for the sake of the enrichment of the soil. There is no doubt that at the present time most people do not want to be bothered with catch crops, preferring to wait till their rubber is tappable. But at the same time, there is also little doubt that many people have " bitten off more than they can chew" in this respect, and will be pinched for money before tha...« less