Part 11

3. Not having seen a reaping-machine, it may seem absurd in me to say that short-strawed wheat is better adapted to it than long- strawed; but every report of the working of these machines goes to show that, so far, they are not well adapted to the cutting of laid corn; therefore a variety that always stands upright will be much better suited to the working of them.

I have been trying for the last six years to obtain (by cross- breeding) a wheat of good quality, and with a straw shorter than Piper's, but hitherto with indifferent success; but, thanks to the kindness of Messrs. Brownells, of Liverpool, who furnished me with many samples of Chilian wheat about three years ago, I have now got varieties much shorter in the straw than Piper's, and some which appear to be of much better quality, but these will require to be tested for a year or two before I can speak decisively about them. The Chilian varieties are very difficult to acclimatize. The original samples were beautiful white wheats, very much resembling the Australian, but when grown in Lancashire they resemble rye more than wheat, and three years' sowing has not much improved them. It has, however, enabled me to obtain crosses which seem better adapted to the soil and climate, and so short in the straw that the highest manuring produces no tendency to lodge.

If we could obtain a variety of wheat of good quality, which, instead of two tons of straw and one of wheat to the acre, produced a ton and a half of each, it might be profitably cultivated, and the differences in the chemical composition of grain and straw are not so very great as to make me despair of this being done some time or other. It may be asked, Where can a short-strawed wheat of good quality be procured? To this I am afraid the reply will be, Nowhere at present. But can none of our expert manipulators, who rejoice exceedingly when they cross-breed a geranium or a fuchsia, turn their attention to the cross-breeding of wheat? Cannot the Royal Agricultural Society offer a premium for a short-strawed wheat of good quality? Do none of the great agriculturists themselves see how desirable such a wheat would be for the agriculture of this country? Apparently not; for with the exception of Mr. Raynbird, of Hampshire, I am not aware of one scientific operator who is endeavouring to produce such a wheat. My own attempts at cross-breeding are such as may be tried by anyone who has sufficient perseverance, and (with one or two exceptions, of doubtful success) have been confined to sowing the different varieties I wished to cross in contiguous drills, and then sowing the produce of these. At the second harvest I carefully select such ears as differ from both varieties, and at the same time seem by their quality of grain and the shortness of their straw to be the best suited to my wishes. It has been, no doubt, to the accidental contact of distinct varieties that we owe the numerous kinds now known to agriculturists, and which differ from each other in colour, quality, yield, and comparative value in the various districts in which they are grown.

Fully sensible of my inability to do justice to this important subject, I yet hope (if you do me the honour to publish my letter) that my remarks may induce scientific men to consider it; for it appears unaccountable to me that hitherto they seem to have thought it unworthy of their attention.

P.S.--There is still time to try the experiment during the present season. If any gentleman wishes to try the short-strawed Chilian wheat, I shall be glad to give him a sample of it for the purpose of cross-breeding. Samples were sent to Mr. H. Briggs, Mr. Raynbird, and Mr. Stevenson, Stockport.

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January 27th, 1848.

To the Editor of the "Agricultural Gazette."

You invite persons who have grown good crops of grain or turnips to forward you the particulars. I therefore enclose you an account of an attempt which I made to grow wheat on the same land year after year, that account reaching to the fourth white crop in 1844. As I still continue the experiment, I shall be in a position to continue the account up to the present time (as I am now threshing out the last year's crop), and will send it to you if you think it worthy of insertion in the "Agricultural Gazette."

If the account I now send is not worth inserting, please to send it to your correspondent A. W., who doubted whether there were authenticated instances of land producing eighty, seventy, or even fifty bushels to the acre.

I attribute my success in growing wheat to the use of silicate of soda, and yet, singularly enough, until now I have been unable to induce anyone else to try it. This season, however, several persons have applied to me to procure it for them. Among them is the talented editor of the "Liverpool Times," whose farm at Barton Moss shows what good management will accomplish on very unpromising soils. If, as I hope will be the case, the silicate of soda should supply to peat its greatest deficiency, no one will more readily discover it than Mr. Baines.

In the use of silicates of soda and potash, one precaution is very necessary, namely, that you really have a soluble silicate, not a mere mechanical mixture of ground flint and alkali. This is a very different thing, and one which, if it be not carefully guarded against, will lead to nothing but disappointment.

Again, the silicate of soda may be properly made, in the first instance, but in a long exposure to the atmosphere, the soda attracts carbonic acid, and is liberated from the silex, and this has disappointed my expectation more than once.

Again, though I consider it desirable to defer the application of soluble silicates until vegetation has made a fair start in the spring, yet in one instance I delayed the application of it so long that there was not moisture to dissolve it until the end of June, and then the plant began to send up suckers from the roots, and the crop was seriously injured by it; but this was in an exceedingly dry spring, and may not happen again for many years.

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CLITHEROE, March 7th, 1848.

In continuing my attempts to grow wheat on the same land year after year, I observed that the crop of 1845 was very seriously injured by the deficient drainage--the old drains having been destroyed by the subsoil plough. It was therefore necessary to replace them; they were accordingly put in four feet deep. This took up so much time, that the season for sowing wheat had gone by, and the ground was cropped with potatoes, which were dug up in September, and the wheat might have been got in early in October; but seeing in your paper that sowing too early was not advisable, and also being carried away by the arguments of the thin-seeders, I deferred sowing until the middle of November, and also put in little seed, and the weather proving very unfavourable when the wheat was coming up, there was not half plant enough in the spring, and I hesitated whether to plough up the ground or to drill in barley. I determined to do the latter. It was put in on the 18th April, and wheat and barley grew up together, and when cut and threshed, it yielded 48 bushels to the acre.

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ON THE GRAVELLING OF CLAY SOILS.

There is an old story of a man, who, having a very stony field, determined to experiment on the value of these stones in the growth of his crops.

With this view he divided his field into three equal parts. From No. 1 he gathered all the stones, which he spread upon No. 3, leaving No. 2 in its original condition. He then sowed barley over the whole field, and carefully noted the results. The story ends by saying that No. 1 bore a miserably poor crop, No. 2 a tolerable one, and No. 3 a splendid one.

I quote this story as a text on which I wish to speak as to the advantage of gravelling heavy clay soils. Some weeks since I spent a few days at the village of Milnthorpe, in Westmoreland, and during one day with Mr. Hutton, the celebrated bone-setter, I remarked that the land was very stony, being covered with stones (not pebbles) having very much the appearance of road metal. He replied, that these stones were essential to the fertility of the soil, and said that some years before there was a great demand for such material in the neighbourhood of Preston, and the high prices stimulated the farmers to gather these stones from their land, and send them to Preston; but the consequences were so injurious to the growth of their crops, that they were compelled--at least those who had the means of doing so--to lead stones again upon their land before their crops would grow again with the vigour which they had before the stones were abstracted. This brought to mind what had occurred in my own farm practice. A church was built in the neighbourhood, and the stones for it were hewn on the corner of a field which was afterwards sown with wheat, and I remarked that the straw was much brighter, the ripening was forwarded ten days, and the sample was much better where the stones had been hewn than elsewhere in the field. (The stones of which the church was built were of ordinary sandstone, probably millstone grit.)

Borrowing from this hint, I had the field covered with about 400 cartloads of alluvial gravel (from the bed of the river) to the acre, and the land was then ploughed two furrows deep, one plough following the other. Previous to this gravelling, the land was a stiff, obdurate clay nearly to the surface. The subsequent effect was the doubling, or more probably trebling the value of the land, which has now become a nice friable soil.

I was much amused with the criticisms of some of the neighbouring farmers (men of the old school), one of whom remarked that he had seen land tilled (manured) in various ways before my time, but until now he had never seen a field tilled with cobble-stones. I said, "What is your objection to it, John?" "Why, ye see, it makes th' land so poor." I replied, "Making anything or anybody poor, means robbing them of something. If you had twenty shillings in your pocket, and I filled it up with these cobble-stones, how much poorer would you be? Of what have I robbed this field by putting gravel into it?" "Why, of nothing; but it looks so queer." I said, "John, did you never hear of a man gathering the stones off his field, and then having to lead them back again?" "Yes, I have; but then they were natural to the soil." I said, "What does manuring land mean, but putting something into it of which it is deficient? You don't till a muck-midden. If in stony land stones are essential for the vigorous growth of the crop, is it not exceedingly probable that they will be still more beneficial on stiff land which has no stones in it?"

This is a doctrine I tried many years since to inculcate upon our friend Mechi, and some of his land (I speak of its condition twenty years since) needed such a gravelling as much as any land I ever saw. Whether he adopted my suggestion, or his land remains in the same condition now as then, I don't know; but if it does, I would just suggest to him and to all landed proprietors who own stiff clay lands, if they are near to gravel-pits, to try a small portion by gravelling it freely, and let us hear the results.

December 2nd, 1871.

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COTTON.