After each rice harvest the soil of the irrigated sementera is turned for planting camotes, but this time it is turned dry.  More effort is needed to thrust the kay-kay deep enough into the dry soil, and it is thrust three or four times before the earth may be turned.  Only one-half the surface of a sementera is turned for camotes.  Raised beds are made about 2 feet wide and 8 to 12 inches high.  The spaces between these beds become paths along which the cultivator and harvester walks.  The soil is turned from the spaces used as paths over the spaces which become beds, but the earth under the bed is not turned or loosened.

Bontoc beds are almost invariably constructed like parallel-sided, square-cornered saw teeth standing at right angles to the blade of the saw, which is also a camote bed, and are well shown in Pl.  LXII.  In Tulubin this saw-tooth bed also occurs, but the continuous spiral bed and the broken, parallel, straight beds are equally as common; they are shown in figs. 2 and 3.

Fig 2. —­ Parallel camote beds.

Fig 3. —­ Spiral camote beds.

The mountain-side sementera for camotes, maize, millet, and beans is prepared simply by being scratched or picked an inch or two deep with the woman’s camote stick, the su-wan’.  If the plat is new the grass is burned before the scratching occurs, but if it is cultivated annually the surface seldom has any care save the shallow work of the su-wan’; in fact, the surface stones are seldom removed.

In the season of 1903, the first rains came April 5, and the first mountain sementera was scratched over for millet April 10, after five successive daily rains.

Fertilizing

Much care is taken in fertilizing the irrigated sementeras.  The hog of a few pueblos in the Bontoc area, as in Bontoc and Samoki, is kept confined all its life in a walled, stone-paved sty dug in the earth (see Pl.  LXXVII).  Into this inclosure dry grasses and dead vines are continually placed to absorb and become rotted by the liquids.  As the soil of the sementera is turned for the new rice crop these pigsties are cleaned out and the rich manure spread on the beds.

The manure is sometimes carried by women though generally by men, and the carriers in a string pass all day between the sementeras and the pueblo, each bearing his transportation basket on his shoulder containing about 100 pounds of as good fertilizer as agricultural man ever thought to employ.

The manure is gathered from the sties with the two hands and is dumped in the sementera in 10-pound piles about 5 feet apart after the soil has been turned and trod soft and even.

It is said that in some sections of Igorot land dry vegetable matter is burned so that ash may be had for fertilizing purposes.

I have seen women working long, dry grass under the soil in camote sementeras at the time the crop was being gathered (Pl.  LXIV), but I believe fertilizers are seldom employed, except where rice is grown.  Mountain-side sementeras are frequently abandoned after a few years’ service, as they are supposed to be exhausted, whereas fertilization would restore them.