The above rates in the case of a 300-acre garden making will include _everything_ but buildings.
The rates are progressive, because the expenditure on the following increases, or should increase, yearly.
1. Manager’s pay (say every second year). 2. Assistant (first entertained, say third year). 3. Cost and wear of tools. 4. Cost of pruning. 5. Cost of cultivation. 6. Cost of manure. 7. General expenses.
No cost for Tea manufacture is included in the above, as this is estimated for separately. See table at pages 160, 161, and 162.
Keeping up high cultivation in every way and manuring liberally, a made garden in full bearing can be kept up to its highest producing powers (including the pay of the manager, establishment, and everything else) for Rs. 100 per acre per annum.
An acre of Tea may, I am aware, be kept up in a manner for Rs. 50 or so yearly, but the profit on such a plantation must be nil.
On the contrary, with the above expenditure per acre, on a good and favourably located garden, the profit will be very large. See table at page 172.
It is with Tea as with all other cultivation. It has been proved in England, and in all other countries where really high cultivation is followed out, that the higher the system followed the greater the profit.
It is stated elsewhere at length (page 102) _why_ I conceive pruning to be necessary for the Tea plant. Whether I am right or not, the fact is certain that without pruning very little leaf is produced.
Pruning must be done in the cold weather when the plant is hybernating, that is to say, when the sap is down. The sooner _after_ the sap goes down it is done the better, for the sooner the tree will then flush in the spring.
There have been many theories about pruning Tea bushes, but none, I think, worth much _practically_, for the simple reason that it is impossible to prune 250,000 plants (the number in a 100-acre garden, at 2,500 to the acre)[25] with the care and system a gardener prunes a favourite fruit tree. The operation _must_ be a coarse one, done by ignorant men, in large numbers at one time, who can in a measure be more or less taught, and the nearer they do right the better: still, really careful and scientific pruning can never be carried out on a Tea plantation.