Much perverse " knocking " of the English climate is
practised by all sorts of critics. An enemy of the wheat quota (with whose other arguments I do not disagree) asks this week : " Why grow a crop for which our climate is singularly ill-suited ? " Now it has been definitely estab- lished by Sir Rowland Biffen, that scientific king of wheat- makers, that the Eastern side of England is one of the best in the world for wheat growing, in certain respects. The long period—ten months or so—of the plant in the ground enables it to tiller out and to give a yield scarcely to be attained ever or anywhere by more rapidly-grown plants or more hotly-ripened ears. Like our apples, the flavour of the grain is fresh and nutty compared with the flavourless starch of white flour from the prairies which, like that of the Snark, is " hollow and meagre if crisp." Much the same may be claimed for Norfolk barley and Scottish oats. Our climate has its special defects. The " festival of the three Icemen "— in the second week of May—may punish our fruit growers as severely as those in Austria, where that trio of untimely saints were christened. A wet August may make the corn sprout in the sheaf. Successive samples of storm and calm, of rain, especially rain, and sun, of frost and thaw, may handicap precise plans and continuous labour ; but in th9 large the clime is good for grain growing, fruit growing, vegetable growing and, above all, for grass growing—one place for one thingwone place for another. It is scarcely credible that this soil in this climate has been " knocked " down to prices as low as 80s. an acre freehold—and this in Norfolk.
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