COUNTRY LIFE

A Bumper Harvest This autumn brings to an end a success, of the English climate greater than any in the records. For the third successive year the crop of apples has been " bumper " in most varieties of the fruit. One of the greatest of the cider- makers has been able for the last two years to fulfil all his needs without importing an apple from France or Spain. In spite of the.degeneration of western orchards of bittersweet apples and perry pears, the yield has been so big that it has sufficed, though in normal years a very large importation has been necessary. The orchards are being revived and young trees planted in gcod quantity, but they take some ten years to come into fair bearing, and both farmers and land- owners have been unwilling to face expenditure that took so long to bear fruit. This reluctance has been partly overcome by the wise offer of some of the cider-makers to supply trees, to plant them, protect them, prune them and spray them at cost price or below it.

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Apple Largess

This year's crop—not yet completely gathered—is at least as large in cooking and eating as the bittersweet, which are necessary for good and wholesome cider. Consumers, especi- ally poorer consumers, have benefited much more than the producers. Sic nos non nobis has been their lament, but they have faced the loss due to excessive production with a good deal of thoughtful and kindly generosity. Thousands of tons have been given away for nothing ; and many of these have gone to the depressed areas and other centres of poverty. Though growers of other apples have suffered from the super- excellence of their produce, the growers of bittersweets and their like have greatly profited, at least in some counties. The price had been fixed long ago and has been independent of the markets ; and as a result English farmers in •the West have been receiving at least £1 10s. a ton above the price of imported apples. The consequent profits during the last two years have made a real and visible increase of rural prosperity. This is an example of betterment on the farm which has no connexion whatever with any Government scheme. It is, so to say, a gentleman's arrangement within the trade and industry.

The Spider's Abettor

A curious observation has been made in a western orchard in the course of a campaign of winter spraying. A few varieties of apples are particularly attractive to a small red spider ; and this particular (but not very general) enemy has increased beyond measure as a result, it is thought, of winter spraying. There is no doubt that the infestation has been vastly greater since the spraying, which has been very success- ful in destrfiying other enemies of the apple. The natural inference is that the tar distillates or what not have killed the enemies of the spiders and so protected them. The facts are worth the investigation of our economic biologists. The first question is : what are the enemies of the red spider ?

A Garden Manure • A salient agricultural or market-garden success that should interest all private gardeners has been achieved by an ex-army officer in Lincolnshire. He believes himself to' have found a newly efficient formula for the oldest of all methods of main- taining and increasing fertility. He grows vegetables and fruit so intensively that he can find use for some thirty regular labourers on each hundred acres. The crops are produced without the use of either farmYard manure in any quantity or of artificial manure. He keeps his land " in good heart," "as farmers say, solely by the use of a compost made of *hat may be called botanical waste. ' Every tur-needed leaf or stalk goes back into the soil. It' is believed that both the health and flavour of the produce are improved ;' and economically the method is beyond all querition: -Mom and more gardeners now use Adco, invented`during the War at Retharnsted, thanks in no small measure to help given by Lord Iveagh. Its use has spread all over the Empire ; and it has proved a potent influence in persuading cultivators of all sorts to. put back into the land. what has - been taken out. The .Lincolnshire compost is not made by this agency; but the secret .is nut

perhaps very different. The idea is, I think, gaining ground that some form of green-manuring produces the healthiest and therefore the most wholesome, crops. One reason is that it benefits the soil, mechanically as well as chemically.

Egyptian Migrants

A number of small blue butterflies—closely resembling, as it seemed to me, our own species—have just been sent from Egypt to English research workers. These insects were migrating in large numbers from Asia to Africa. This is just . one of scores of examples, coming from all quarters of the world, in answer to the call for further evidence on these new theories of insect migration. Will anyone in any part of the world who comes upon examples of such movements among insects let the'South Kensington Museum have the information? It is already astonishing how the world is co-operating in this research ; but there are some wide gaps still to be filled. Egypt has been especially fruitful in informatioa.

A Butterfly Snowstorm

Many correspondents have written to me on the subject, the more or less new subject, of butterfly and insect migration. The letters concern many parts of the world and seem to indicate that mass migration of butterflies is a world-wide phenomenon. The most interesting and indeed scientifically important of these accounts conies from the diary of a lady who was living at the time at Limon' in Kenya, at an altitude of about 7,000 feet above sea level. This is the extract : " For a fortnight swarms of white butterflies have been passing—so many that they look exactly like snowflakes. Only for a day now and then have they stopped and settled on trees and bushes ; then again they have passed in a con- tinual stream coming from the North and flying South." This description, even to the simile, is very like an account of white butterfly swarms, migrating South, given by Miss Turner when she was living for the sake of observing birds on Scolt Head in Norfolk. Most butterfly mass-movements seem to go North and South—in America as in Africa--but some East and West migrations are also recorded.

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Stolen Homes

Something was said in a note of last week about three dormice that had occupied three nesting boxes for tits. A yet stranger example of a purloined residence has been observed in a wood above the banks of the river Arrow where I was walking this week. A jay built, as its habit is, about fourteen feet up an oak tree, and the site seemed so suitable to a brown squirrel that it made the jay's nest the foundation of its own house, and built on it its own loose and large drey. The squirrel was less forbearing than the dormice, which had the gentility to wait till the tits had finished with the box. The squirrel got to work soon after the jay began laying its clutch. The jay's nest contained one egg when first found. A week later the superstructure was in building and no egg remained. The brown squirrel is not nearly so omnivorous as the grey ; but its tastes arc wide. They ' certainly extend from young rooks to nuts, and it is likely that this squirrel began its home-making with an egg meal. The district is happy in the possession of a good many red squirrels and no grey.

* s a * Autumn Colours

The peak of autumn colouration this year will coincide with Martinmas or just precede it in Southern and Midland England. This last week even the horse-chestnuts were still half green in sheltered valleys of Worcestershire, though most chestnuts and limes and poplars of the East were becoming " bare ruined choirs." Many trees are lovely in autumn— maple, cherry, thorn, elm and the rest ; but how the beech dominates. It is autumn's very self over all the chalk region, and the lead is given by the beeches of Buckinghamshire. In a competition for the gayest individual leaf perhaps the spindle and the cherry would be put at the top of the list, yet perhaps the old-gold oaks would put in a claim ; for they last longeLt.

W. BEACH THOMAS.