COUNTRY LIFE
Burdened Orchards
It is both cheering and depressing to see such superabundant crops of fruit as I have seen this week and last in the West of England. The excess of pleasure over depression filled me with admiration in one district. The plums hung from the trees in tens of thousands, in tons. The owner of the orchard had spent a good deal of labour in propping up the over- weighted boughs with poles. He had spent much more time and money in thinning the fruit at an earlier stage. It is not easy work, and the workers themselves dislike it, for purely psychological reasons : it goes to their heart to destroy the kindly fruits. Indeed, one woman who wanted work in the orchards flatly refused to take part in the thinning. The fruit from some orchard had been sold at less than £4 a ton, a price that would, of course, bring no profit to the owner ; but he rejoiced nevertheless—again for psychological or ethical reason;. Cheap and pleasant food was produced in large quantities. The orchard had justified itself. The pickers rejoiced and money was in circulation.
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Fruit and Factories
The heavy or excessive crop is a difficult problem. It is all wrong that the producer, that benefactor to society, should suffer ; but it is not easy to discover a scheme by which he shall reap the fruit of his fruit. It was at one time argued by theoretic reformers that the bottling and preserving factory provided a solution. Now there is such a factory near the most heavily laden orchards that I visited. This, too, has had its difficulties ; and it is abundantly clear from a study of the fortunes of this or any other canning factory that its economic success depends on a regular supply of the right sorts of produce. It needs as much fruit in lean years as in plentiful. It cannot afford to wait the four or five years that intervene between the dates of bumper crops. Over and above this : the fruits that bear best and are best for the market are often different from the varieties that are especially desired in the factor.e3. If factories are to solve the problem they must be in the hands of some central authority that is content to wait for the occasion on behalf of the community. Such factories for making polenta and for extracting alcohol from potatoes are in active existence in several European countries, including France and Germany.
Grading and Marking Marketing skill, in association with the National Mark, may do something to compensate for a low price level. On one Worcestershire farm a plum-grader, the invention of a local genius, was at work under the guidance of two young women. It is a delightful machine, very simple and very quiet. It turns each plum sideways, carries it along and drops it according to its girth into this basket and that. The spotless and the spotted plums are guided by the young woman to this and that side of the moving platform and so graded separately. The " extra-selected " -which fall through the biggest crevice in the jogging, advancing slats, are packed by hand in boxes and look singularly attractive between their clean paper frills. Their appearance and quality ensure them a fair market even in a year of glut. The National Mark have stereotyped two grades—" selected " and " extra- selected." These were fetching more or less 4s. and over 3s. a box when the ungraded fetched not more than ls. 3d. and the sub-grade plums ls. If growers combined at all in a co-operative grading station, half the problem would be solved ; and the ideal of the National Mark be realised. Incidentally a very wise addition to technique of marketing has been devised by the organisers of the National Mark. The first grade is associated with the colour blue and the second grade with red, so that the degree of quality leaps to the eye at once.
Wet Season Enemies Wet seasons, as we all know, give mildews and funguses their best conditions. Not very many plants are wholly exempt from their pernicious influence. They rise from the ground and the roots, they float in the air. They settle on leaf and growing shoot—and goodbye fruit. What is useful and what is ornamental, both suffer. Roses become as unsightly as hops become barren. The mildew is a tough enemy to conquer ; but it has enemies, and the grower has friends. The chief is sulphate of copper. Some of my neighbours have given up the growing of that most lovely and useful polyanthus rose, Else Poulsen, because the leaf is so prone to mildew. Now the Rose Society tells us that the fungus lives in the soil ; and that if we would spray twice, once in January and once in February, we might abate if not wholly cure the plague. One ounce of sulphate of copper to a gallon of water is the recipe. To pass from beauty to use—I saw last week one hop orchard healthy and prolific in the midst of orchards ravaged to the point of extinction by mildew. It had been saved, up to that . date at any rate, by free and skilful spraying with Bordeaux Mixture. The blue colour that emanated from the whole field suggested that here too the enemy of the mildew was in large measure sulphate of copper.
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Inartistic Cuckoos That strange bird the cuckoo is departing to the south and east, and in large numbers. The immigration in April was large, and those ingenious persons who have been following the careers of individual birds have come to the conclusion that each hen cuckoo (and she is held to be polyandrous by some critics) lays over twenty fertile eggs. Certainly the number of young cuckoos, so far as my experience goes, is very large. I saw a wonderful collection this week of cuckoos' eggs with the clutches among which they were found. It has been sail often enough that a particular cuckoo which lays a particularly coloured egg (and one bird usually lays an egg of one type), chooses a clutch of eggs resembling it. Now one of these cuckoos, whose eggs I saw, had laid in the nests of six different species within one year. It goes without saying that her egg did not resemble the eggs of all those prospective foster parents. The hedge sparrow is a favourite foster parent, and no cuckoo's egg is blue or coloured like the hedge sparrow's. The most that could be said was that one of the cuckoos that had chosen a hedge sparrow's nest laid an egg with perhaps a rather greener background than any other cuckoo in the collection.
"Airiated" Bulbs The bulb catalogues that now reach us by every other post (some from abroad but more and more from Eastern England) bear witness to the yearly increase in the habit of forcing bulbs for Christmas. When the new English bulb industry was beginning our Lincolnshire growers concentrated chiefly on daffodils and tulips, both of which they grew, and grew to perfection. Some growers now produce as excellent hyacinths and issue with their catalogues the very soundest advice on the technique of encouraging the bulbs to flower fully and at the right date. How many people kill the flower by beginning to force the bulb before it is ready ! The general advice is clear and wise ; but the English is not always above criticism even in English catalogues. The alleged word " airiated " seems to be almost established in lieu of aiirated ; and the emphasis on it may help to remind many of us that bulbs which arrive by post in stuffy parcels need a preliminary dose of air, only less than they will presently need earth and water. The first bulbs to put into the ground are, of course, some of the lilies, which seldom do much good if planted after or much after August. On the subject of lilies, one wild lily has been growing very tall and flowering very freely in a Berkshire wood where it received scarcely a fleck of sunlight. How many of the tribe dislike sunshine for their lower parts.
Beneficent Sun
Seldom did sunshine pay higher dividends than in this belated bout of summer. It has brought the likelihood of at least a moderate corn harvest. Some excellent crops of wheat have already been Carried, even in the north-west of England. Lancashire has been doing well ; and it is hoped that it may have arrested the potato blight there, as it has arrested the hop blight in some of the Worcestershire fields. The number of rabbits (which are a plague of the year) killed when the last patches of grain were cut is quite beyond all
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