Page:Reminiscences of Earliest Canterbury 1915.pdf/19

 but it seemed to me that the pith of the tree had the sugar encrusted in it. The Maoris carried it with them in this fibrous form. They chewed it when on a journey, spitting out the fibre when they had exhausted the sugar from it. As boys we were very fond of this. It had an excellent flavour, and we collected it, soft and brown in colour, by knocking the fibre on a piece of wood. It was very good for sweetening tea. This native-made sugar was troublesome to pro­duce, and when ordinary sugar could be procured they gave up preparing it, and I believe the art is now lost.

Potatoes were, of course, cultivated by the Maoris. In clearing a patch in the bush they cut down the small trees. They lopped the branches off the larger ones, and laid the timber thus collected on the ground. The grass and fern were then cut level with the ground. In this way they generally got a capital burn, and got splendid crops of potatoes from the soil. If they wanted a second crop they left a few small ones in the ground when digging out the first.

Their method of sowing grain (wheat or oats) was peculiar. When digging potatoes they sowed grain as they dug, and in turning