COUNTRY LIFE
THE fact that some German prisoners clamour for black bread, as we call it, may give a hint to our agricultural and social reformers. Rye is an admirable cereal crop. It will flourish on indifferent soils, it yields heavily ; it is a good resister of bad weather and the straw is valuable for the making of protective mats for garden frames and such. The trouble is that our people most foolishly have come to regard white bread, that savourless, starchy, artificial product, as an accompaniment of high living and black bread as symbolic of poverty. But the black is the richer food and to the taste many of us much the more interesting. It has at any rate character. Let us set back the clock, often a very good thing to do3 and grow and eat more rye bread: fas est et ab hoste doceri.
Harvest Foes The sparrows in their thousands have left the towns for the fields. The headlands are cut. The harvest, the most important of modern times, begins. It would not be a bad thing if sportsmen (supposing any are left with spare time and equipment) who look forward to September the first, should treat August the first as the height of the sparrow season. The amount of good corn they are beginning to consume is enormous ; and the hosts of emigrants from towns, especially perhaps in- the Midlands, are the worst enemies. In spite of these harpies and .the weeds the yield is likely to be big. One oat field to be cut this week was yellow with charlock and is now yellow with hawkweed, which this year seems to have found its optimum of conditions. At sowing time the surface looked like a gravel path, so thick were the flints. Nevertheless and notwithstanding, it is one of the best fields in the neighbourhood and the yield is estimated as ten per cent. above the average. How blessed a thing it is that the newer . threshing machines can sort out the weed seeds ; and in war there is a market even for these.
Strange Birds
A fisherman, with a very long knowledge of the Clyde, tells me that about this season his garden is visited by a number of pied wagtails, rather larger in size than the common and of different habits and ways.
What were they? Their numbers are in contrast to the sad falling off in the tale of most small birds towards the north of the island. Wag- tails are among the most successful of small birds in endurance of cold ; and last winter in the north the prolonged cold, continued by frosts in June, was more than usually deadly to the weaker species. The con- trast between north and south was abnormally abrupt. Though the winter was hard, it did not affect vegetation in the south—winter beans for example came through unscathed—and while young grouse (as I hear) are still weak on the wing, young partridges are extremely forward. One covey of 14 partridges that I see frequently is so strong on the wing that the children are difficult to distinguish from their parents. How greatly all over England more and better farming has added to the numbers of this most agricultural bird! Will there be available sportsmen for their reduction? I understand that the value of game to the national larder is being so seriously' considered in White- hall that sportsmen are likely to be allowed extra petrol for transport. In return they should be very careful to preserve their spent cartridge cases, which are a very valuable form of salvage. In regard to grouse, if not partridges, excess of stock almost always means disease.
In the Garden A practice, often of dubious value in the vegetable garden, is proving most successful this summer. Broad beans, heavily afflicted by the black fly, were cut down to within about four inches of the bottom, and are now a mass of flower and young pods. It was remarkable in this crop how successfully the winter-sown beans—in sharp contrast to the spring-sown—resisted or avoided the fly. Those that were Pro- tected by cloches throughout the winter suffered not at all and gave a large and very early crop. American ivy-leaved blackberries, Willson Junior and other sorts of cultivated blackberries promise a big yield, and their almost invariable success may be in part due to the extreme fondness of bees, and indeed of butterflies, for their flowers. They are well worth growing, and are a quite comely as well as useful decora- tion to a pergola pole, though the giant variety is best avoided for this secondary purpose.
W. BEACH THOMAS.
Postage on this issue : Inland and Overseas, rd.
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