Green Tilth
The next field but one to this clover field, whose ,rostrate crop already looks brown under the sun, is a picture f war-time farming. It was grass, and is now filth; but it , very nearly as green as it has been these many years—per-
haps these many generations. It was ploughed up only the other day and without more ado sown broadcast, as in primi- tive days, with mustard. You would scarcely have thought that any seed would have grown on so rugged and unpre- pared a seed-bed, and the harrow that followed the seeding had a rough and ineffective passage ; but the mustard seed (though it does not grow into a tree where the birds may roost) germinates and grows with almost magical speed. Some of the plants are already eight inches high. The purpose of this mustard is, of course, to fertilise the crop of grain that will be sown later. It will be ploughed in, and its speed of growth implies a tenderness of tissue that makes it rot into fertility with due celerity. It is an odd thing that the seed of the wild mustard, which is one of the worst and most prevalent of farm weeds, is remarkable not so much for its quickness in germinating as for its longevity in a dormant state. I have seen a ridge of earth dug out in making a well become green and then yellow a few weeks later with a mass of this charlock. Our soldiers in the Great War were very familiar with the masses of this weed that would flourish on the parapets. There is no reasonable doubt that something in the seed, perhaps a certain oiliness, preserves it almost indefinitely if it is kept away from light and air. It is an instance of the perpetual struggle of things that wheat is one of the most short-lived of seeds, so far as germinating capa- city is concerned, and its chief weeds, poppy as well as char- lock, are intensely resistant to decay.
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