t apart, an
average of 680 trees to the acre. The seeds are planted in February; and
if the seedlings are transplanted, that is done when they are a year or
a year and a half old. The guama, a big strong tree of dense foliage, is
used for a wind-break on the ridges; and the guava, for shade in the
plantation. Plow cultivation is generally impossible on account of the
lay of the land, and only hoeing and spade work are done. Pruning is
carefully attended to as the trees become full grown.

Flowering is generally in February and March, or even later. Heavy rains
in April make a poor crop. Harvesting begins in September and extends
into January, during which time ten pickings are made.

[Illustration: SINGLE PORTO RICO COFFEE TREE IN FULL BEARING, PROPPED
UP WITH STAKES]

The average yield per acre is between 200 and 300 pounds; but expert
authority--Prof. O.F. Cook--in a statement made to the Committee on
Insular Affairs of the United States House of Representatives, in 1900,
held that under better cultural methods the yield could be increased to
800 or 900 pounds per acre. One estimator has calculated that an average
plantation of 100 acres had cost its owner at the end of six or seven
years, the bearing age, about $13,100 with yields of 75 pounds per acre
in the third and in the fourth years, 400 pounds per acre in the fifth
year, and 500 pounds in the sixth year, the income from which would
practically have met the cost to that time. It is held by the same
authority that an intensively cultivated, well-situated farm of selected
trees, 880 to the acre, should yield some 880 pounds of cleaned coffee
to the acre.

COSTA RICA. Costa Rica ranks next to Guatemala and Salvador among the
Central American countries as a producer of coffee, showing an average
annual yield in recent years of 35,000,000 pounds as compared with
Guatemala's 80,000,000 and Salvador's 75,000,000 pounds. Nicaragua has
an average annual production of 30,000,000 pounds.

Coffee was introduced into Costa Rica in the latter part of the
eighteenth century; one authority saying that the plants were brought
from Cuba in 1779 by a Spanish voyager, Navarro, and another saying that
the first trees were planted several years later by Padre Carazo, a
Spanish missionary coming from Jamaica. For more than a century six big
coffee trees standing in a courtyard in the city of Cartago were pointed
out to visitors as the very trees that Carazo had planted.

The c