COUNTRY LIFE
OF all our plants none responds more successfully to drought than cereals. The Canadian prairies flourish because the wheat is usuall started in growth by a little rain, but thereafter left chiefly to the s Did ever the field crops, especially the wheats, look better in England The one qualification is that annual weeds have enjoyed the optimum of conditions. The charlock has given the bees a rate hone flow, and the poppies set the fields on fire. Moon daisies and foxglov are other weeds—so to call them—that are in unusual force.
Reclaimed Acres A great many sorts of land reclamation are going forward in vario parts of Britain. Roads are being made, in the Fens, to land actual recovered from the waters. In Somerset marshes have been drai Much alleged farmland has been restored to fertility by the d of ditches, the grubbing of thorns and briars (which have spoilt ma Edens), and more by various manuring devices, including (as in Cornw the casting of sand and crumbled sea-shells from the shore on to inlan deserts. Land in Hertfordshire previously regarded as a mere site f dumped rubbish has been found capable of growing admirable cm of potatoes, sunflower and even sugar beet. Some of the most successf attempts to make the desert blossom as the rose (and how splendid t wild roses are!) are recorded from both Wales and its islands and f Scotland, where bracken had enjoyed a monopoly, but the onslaught this beautiful but most unagricultural fern might be carried furth especially on the Welsh hills. In one experiment—in Montgomery was proved that ploughed-in bracken, even when newly ploughed, one of the very best potato manures. The statistics of potatoes, set ye late on land only just cleared of superficial bracken, are astonishing. parts of Scotland bracken has been hand-cut in successive bouts by ve young and by old labour over considerable areas, and the schoolbo and business men who have done much of the work rejoice to see th the bracken begins to give up the unequal contest. Two inciden enemies of good husbandry have been simultaneously scotched, the rab and the sheep flies.
Useful Weeds The nettle has been earning much the same reputation as the brack Where nettles flourish other crops will especially flourish ; and the c nettles are found to be the best of all contributions to the corn heap. They supply what perhaps no other weed supplies in su proportion. A suggestive contrast in the treatment of certain weeds w to be seen in Bedfordshire not so long ago. While a considerable farm was raking out the twitch from his land and burning the heaps, a m gardener near by was burying the grass in the trenched vegetable patc The farmer himself pointed out to me the theoretic superiority of t intensive gardener's method.
Swallow Queries
Two questions about the swallow have been put up to me from v different sources. Do swifts and swallows disagree? It happens t round my own house swifts are in greater numbers than usual and ha been flying almost as low down as the martins. Swallows are few It is possible that the " devling "—a word for the swift that has seve forms—may scare the swallow. It is, after all, more nearly allied as species to hawk than hininclo ; but there is no real rivalry in the or in nesting site. The other query, or rather assertion, is that swallo and martins never build on new houses. They certainly seem to pref old ones ; but I have known them build in a brand-new garage. is more likely that the martins, whose else unsupported nests trust glue more than the swallows', find a more congenial surface on o material. One old farmhouse in my neighbourhood has supported many as sixty martins' nests on one stretch of wall and window.
In the Garden
On one vegetable farm an acre or two is being planted with purple broccoli—not the sprouting broccoli, which everyone grows, the single-headed purple ; and since this has the same toughness agai frost and winter conditions as the rather dull sprouting broccoli, worth a more general popularity. Those who are sowing late for early winter consumption will probably get a larger and be yield, at any rate in a frame, by sowing broadcast, a method that is v rarely to be recommended. It is a great rose year. The crown of th at the moment is the briar—a true species—Moschata Floribunda. Ti like most others, it is not " fast of its smell," but scents the wh garden. It excels (if that is the word) all others in rampageousness in wealth of blossom and stoutness of thorn. W. BEACH THOMAS.
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