expence not a tenth part what it had been. There were 108 carts, of 80 stone each, or 2246 stoue per acre, which, at 6d. per stone, would amount to 601. and upwards per acre. I have made use of them as in the preceding year, with the most complete success, and saved 60 bushels of oats per week, and shall be able to continue to do so for a fortnight or three weeks longer.

In the first trial an acre of carrots was equal in food to 23 of oats, allowing 60 Winchester bushels of oats per acre, and at three stone the bushel. On taking up the carrots a small piece was cut from the top of each, to prevent it from vegetating, and these were immediately used. The remainder were piled in rows two feet thick, and five feet high, leaving a space between each row for a free circulation of air. I do not doubt but that they would keep in this way for a length of time. I have always made immediate use of them, as old oals are more valuable than new, and, moreover, the saving of oats is in itself a matter of much import.

The success of these trials has determined me to extend the cultivation of carrots, and I have prepared ten acres for the ensuing season.

Mr Young recommends carrots as a substitute for hay: when they can be procured with little or no expence, this may answer; but when the ground. is to be prepared for them at a considerable expence, cheaper substitutes may be found. Though the expences are great in cultivating carrots, yet the giving of them in part instead of oats, will most abundantly repay them. The expence of each acre in sowing, cleaning, and housing, will not be short of 151.

Whatever system can multiply the produce of one acre into that of two

or more, is, I conceive, an object to a country where the consumption of the first necessary of life exceeds what is at present produced within the empire. In this point of view I flatter myself that the present paper may not be thought unworthy the atten tion of the society.

We, Isaac Kendall, bailiff, and Thomas Moore, groom, to J.C. Cur wen, esq; do certify, that Mr. Cur wen's working horses had 4lb. of car rots given them in the room of so much oats, from October 1805 to January 1806, being three months: that without the use of carrots Mr. Curwen allows his working horses from 8 to 12lb. of oats per day, ac cording to the size and work of the horses; that the carrots answered every purpose, and that the horses were never in better condition than at the time when they were in use; and we believe that they would not have been better, nor fitter for work, with the whole allowance of oats; that the crops of carrots have been extremely good by Mr. Curwen's mode of management. The saving of oats wa fifty-eight Winchester bushels per week, by the use of carrots, upon the food of seventy-six horses.

Workington, May 10, 1806.

Method of preserving Turnips in th Winter Season. By Mr. James Dean, of Exeter.

[From the Same.] When surveying an estate in the South-Hams of Devon, in February last, my attention was attracted by the singular appearance of a crop turnips in an orchard, so thick as to touch each other, and closely sur round the stems of the apple-trees I enquired of the farmer the reason of so unusual a crop, and I received from

from him some curious information. It was the constant practice, he said, in his neighbourhood, for farmers, after they had broken up ley ground, first to take a crop of turnips, and in the autumn, or rather winter, to sow wheat in the same ground. Should winter fodder be scarce, they then preserve the turnip crop for stock, and consequently could not put in wheat before January; and even then with no probability of having more than two thirds of an usual crop, because of the late sowing. This was an evil of great magnitude, and led him, he added, to make trial of a mode peculiarly successful, enabling him to sow his seed in the proper season, and to save the most valuable of his turnip crop during the winter.

He got, he said, his turnip seed into the ground early in June; and in October, by which time the turnips would have grown to a large size, he had the largest of them drawn without injuring the leaves, and then placed close to each other on the grass in the orchard, in the same position in which they grew. Their leaves preserved them from external injury; and their tap-roots put out in a short time other fibrous roots into the grass, which in orchards is generally long in the autumn; and thus the turnips were preserved good for use.

I enquired whether the turnips acquired any additional size after their removal into the orchard, and whether, from the warmth occasioned by the turnips to the ground, any advantageous effect was apparent in the apple-trees. On these questions he was not able to speak positively, though he thought the turnips had increased in size; and he thought, likewise, that the crops of apples appeared larger, and the annual bearings more certain, in the orchard I

was observing, than in those where no turnips were put; though, till the time I spoke, he had not even guessed at the cause.

On the Culture of Spring Wheat. By Sir Joseph Banks, Bart.

[From the Same.]

Real spring wheat, the Triticum Estivum, or summer wheat of the botanists, is a grain too tender to bear the frosts of the winter; but as quick in progress from its first shoot to ripeness, as barley, oats, or any other spring corn.

It is well known on all parts of the continent, and much used in France, where it is called Blé de Mars, from the season in which it is usually sown; and in some provinces Bleds Tremois, from the time it takes between seed-time and harvest; in Spanish it is called Trigo de Marzo ; in Portuguese, Trigo Tremes; and in German Sommer Waitzen; all which names mark distinctly the difference between this and winter corn.

It does not appear from the older books on husbandry, that it was at any former period much cultivated in England; the more modern ones are in general silent on the subject of it. They mention, indeed, under the name of spring wheat, every kind of winter wheat which will ripen when sown after turnips in February. This is probably the reason why the real spring wheat has been so little known; agriculturalists in general, conceiving themselves to be actually in the habit of sowing spring wheat, when in reality they were substituting winter wheat in its place, have been little inclined to enquire into the properties of the real spring wheat when they had an opportunity of so doing.

In

In the lower parts of Lincolnshire, where the land is the most valuable, and consequently the most subject to mildew, spring wheat has been long known, and it is now cultivated to a great extent. Mr. Sers, of Gedney, near Spalding, has this year claimed a premium of the board for the largest quantity of land sown with spring wheat in 1805; his quantity is 241 acres, and there is no reason to suppose that he added a single acre to his crop on account of the board's offer. He is a man who, by bis skill and talents in agriculture alone, has raised himself to opulence, and possesses a considerable landed estate, for which he is certainly in part indebted to the free culture of spring wheat during the last thirty years.

Mr. Sers sows spring wheat from the 25th of March till the first week in May; for a full crop he sows fourteen pecks on an acre, and expects to reap four quarters; if he sows seeds under it, which is very generally practised, he sows nine pecks, and expects three quarters in return he finds it thrive nearly equally well on his stiff and his light land; and has found it, by experience, to be exempt from the mildew or blight, and free from all damage of the grub or wire-worm.The farmers in South Holland, where Mr. Sers resides, uniformly declare that they have been many years ago compelled, by frequent attacks of the mildew or blight, to abandon almost entirely the sowing of winter wheat, and that they then substituted spring wheat in its place, and have used it ever since: they believe it to be wholly exempt from the mildew or blight. In the neighbourhood of Horncastle, where I live, the land is either light or sandy, or composed chiefly of Norfolk marie,

called in that neighbourhood white clay. Such land, though tolerably productive in barley and seeds, is not to be compared with the rich and fertile tracts of South Holland; and yet the culture of spring wheats has of late years increased, and is now increas ing fast, because the millers begin to understand its nature, and cease to undervalue it as they did at first.

The grain of spring wheat is considerably smaller than that of winter wheat; in colour it resembles red lammas so much, that it may be mixed with that grain, and this mixture will do no injury to the seller, as spring wheat weighs heavy; nor to the buyer, as it yields better at the mill than from its appearance might be expected; 60lb. a bushel is about its usual weight. Mr. Sers's, of this year, weighed 61lbs. and he has sold some mixed with less than balf of red lammas, at the usual marketprice of the winter wheat of the last harvest, though the winter wheat is better in quality this year, and the spring worse than usual.

In the countries best acquainted with its culture, spring wheat is preferred to all other corn for raising & crop of seeds. This is owing to the small quantity of leaf it bears, less perhaps than any other corn, and to the short duration of the leaf, which fades and falls down almost as 500% as it has attained its full size.

In cases where red wheat has been damaged by the wire-worm, a m chief which seems of late years to have increased in this island, spring wheat appears to hold out an easy and a simple remedy. In the first week of May the ravages of the worm have abated somewhat; if then the seed of spring wheat is at that time dibbled, or only raked with a gar den rake into the naked spots left by

the

the worm, though it will not attain the growth at which the worm begins to prey upon it till he has changed his state for that of a winged beetle, will certainly be ripe as soon as the winter wheat, and may be thrashed out and sold with it; or if it is preferred, may be reaped separately, as the appearance of the ears, which in the Lincolnshire sort have longer beards or awms, than the rivett or cone wheat, will point it out to the reapers in such a manner that no great error can happen in separating it from the lammas.

In years of scarcity, this wheat offers a resource which may occasionally be of the utmost importance to the community; of this the board were very sensible last spring, when they offered premiums for the increase of its culture, which have had the effect of rendering it much more generally known than otherwise would have been the case. The price of wheat seldom advances much, even in very scarce years, till a considerable portion of the crop has been thrashed out, and the yield of it by this means actually ascertained; but this does not take place till the seedtime of winter wheat is wholly over; no speculation, therefore, of sowing an increased quantity of that grain can be entered into during the first year of a scarcity; but before the end of April the question of the average-yield of the preceding crop will be generally known, and when it is much below the usual proportion, there can be no doubt that a large quantity of spring wheat will be sown, if the seed can be easily procured.

It is rather melancholy to reflect, that the progress of agricultural improvements has in some instances advanced in the inverse ratio of the utility of the novelty recommended to the public. Tobacco and potatoes VOL, XLIX.

reached Europe at much the same period, the time when Virginia was settled by Sir Walter Raleigh; but an ineffectual firmaum was issued by the Great Mogul against the use of tobacco, long before potatoes were commonly cultivated in the gardens of England; and that nauseous weed reached the farthest extremities of the Chinese empire, in spite of the obstacles placed by the government of that country against the introduction of novelties of any kind, long before potatoes had occupied any extensive portion in the field-cultivation of this island.

Lest the revival of the culture of spring wheat, even under the liberal protection it has received from the board, may be retarded by this principle, which seems to be inherent in the nature of mankind, it may be adviseable to state here, that in the neighbourhood of Boston and Spalding, in Lincolnshire, the cultivation of it is now fully established, and likely to continue; from either of these places, therefore, the seed may at any future time, as well as at present, be obtained without difficulty; and as there is a water communication between these towns, and as Boston is a sea-port, it may always be brought to London, or any other maritime part of England, at a small charge.

In times when dearth recurs, which will occasionally happen as long as the manufacturing interest insists on keeping the price of corn, in a plentiful harvest, below the actual cost of growing it, speculations on the sowing of spring wheat may be carried so far as to raise the price of seed till a saving in it becomes a matter of political as well as of economical importance; an experiment is therefore added, to shew that spring wheat will succeed as well by dibbling as by broadcast, made in the spring 1804. 3 K

Mr.

Mr. William Showler, an intelligent farmer at Revesby, in Lincolnshire, dibbled four pecks and a half of spring wheat on one acre and two roods of middling land, which had borne turnips the winter before, and had no extraordinary preparation for this crop; the rows were eight inches asunder; the holes four inches asunder and two inches deep; two graius were put into each hole.

The produce from the quantity of 4 pecks of seed was 7 quarters; or 4 quarters, i bushel, and 1 peck, an acre; a fair crop, and as much at least as could have been expected from 18 or 21 bushels sown broad

cast on the same land.

By a careful analysis in the wet way, conducted by professor Davy, of the Royal Institution, the following results have been obtained from different kinds of wheat:

From this ingenious analysis we may fairly deduce, that bread made of the flour of spring wheat is more nutritious than that made of winter wheat, because spring wheat contains a larger proportion of the gluten or half-animalised matter; and also that a miller ought not to deduct from the price of spring wheat more than 2 per cent. on the mouey price of winter wheat of the same weight, as the excess of the weight of insoluble matter, or bran, is no more than 2 per cent. when compared with good English winter wheat.

Bread made of spring wheat is rather less white than that made of the

better sorts of winter wheat; but it is allowed to be more palatable in Lincolnshire, where it is best known. Both these qualities are probably owing to the excess of gluten contained in it.

A Plan for improving the Growth of Tares. By Mr. Thomas Herod, of North Creak, Norfolk.

[From Communications to the Board of Agriculture.]

To be sown broad-cast in October, from ten to twelve pecks per acre, with one peck of wheat, then plough. ed into four-furrow ridges. In the months of April and May, a one horse-plough (double breast) is to be run through the furrows; this will keep them clean, and admit the air to the roots of the tares, and will keep them clean and growing till Midsum

mer.

Observations.

Tares being found very useful for the soiling of cattle, and the best plan of growing them being required by the board, I submit one for their consideration which I have practised seven years with success. They are a plant that contain a great deal of moisture, particularly when young, therefore it is not proper to soil cattle with them in that state without food; those persons who are destitute of that must give them very sparingly, or they injure their stock more than they are aware of. On the general plan of sowing, soon after they are at an age proper for the stock, they begin to rot at the bottom; to obviate which, some people sow rye, some oats, and some barley: the stems of the latter being weak, of course they can have no effect: the former soon get hard, and the cattle refuse to eat

them;