COUNTRY LIFE
The Harvest Month
Harvest has begun, but the bulk of it is late, not early, and still awaits hot sunshine to set the flourish on it. The immense yield of English grain crops, especially of wheat, is due largely to the amount of rain (though the mildness of the winter is accessory): the lack of quality, as the millers reckon quality, is due chiefly to inadequate sunshine. Unless it is desired to store it for a number of years, the moistness of the wheat is no real disqualification. The grain is sweeter and probably more wholesome as well as more pleasant, and it is a pity (as Sam Slick would have expressed it) that English wheat should have been persistently " knocked," not " boosted " ; and now that the thresher-harvesters have entailed the use of scientific driers, in place of exposure in shocks, the quality, even from the point of view of the big loaf specialists, is enhanced in such high yielding wheats as Wilhelmina as well as in the stronger Yeoman type.
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