Posted Fri Oct 15, 2004, 9:20am Subject: Ebook on coffee growing in Mysore just posted onto Project Gutenburg
Project Gutenburg aims to get texts that are in the public domain into electronic form. A new book was just added: Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore by Robert Henry Elliot (1837-1914)
It has beautiful descriptions of the culture, economy, terrain, and coffee cultivation in Mysore, including a whole chapter on the benefits of growing coffee in shade, and which types of trees are the best. A couple excerpts:
"After a long and attentive observation of the various occupations of life, I have no hesitation in saying that, for one who has to earn his bread somewhere, the life of a planter in Mysore, if not the very pleasantest and most interesting (and as far as my own experience goes it is both) in the world, is assuredly one of the most agreeable occupations that anyone of intelligence, industry, and active habits, and fond of sport and an independent and open-air life, could betake himself to."
"I now turn to the greatest of all the points connected with coffee--the question of shade. And I call it the greatest point, because if good shade of the best kind is grown it is absolutely impossible to destroy a plantation in Mysore, even with the worst conceivable management or neglect, and I say this after ample experience, as had it not been for the abundant and excellent shade on a badly-managed property of my own it would have been permanently ruined."
"One of these squirrels was brought to me when it was about half grown, and came to consider my house as its natural home. It soon discovered a suitable retreat for the day in the shape of an empty clothes-bag hanging at the back of a door, and in this it slept all day. It came out at dusk, and used often to sit on the back of my high backed chair as I sat at dinner, and then I gave it fruit and bread. After dinner away it went to the jungle, and I seldom saw anything more of it till very early in the morning, when it used to enter the house by an open swing window, get on to my bed, and curl itself up at my feet. When I rose my pet did so too and betook itself to the clothes-bag, and there spent the day, to go through the same round the following night."
Dana Leighton - Espresso hack and CoffeeGeek moderator
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