108 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



afraid of a windy day. There are implements that do their 

 work fairly. Cahoon's is a very ingenious contrivance, and 

 answers a good turn upon a still day. But in making a cheap 

 grain crop one can't always wait for the weather. Tlie man 

 who could be trusted with the machine could get along with- 

 out. There are good horse-power drills that will come in 

 play I hope in the future days of more thorough tillage. 

 But, meantime, sowing by hand should not become one of 

 the lost arts. It is very convenient for the small farmer to 

 slip out in the gray of the morning and cover his five or six 

 acres with seed before breakfast, while his team is eating, or? 

 If the day is hot, he can sow his grain while his animals rest ; 

 or if larger undertakings are in hand, a good sower will lay 

 on the seed faster, by hand, than any harrow or bush ought 

 to follow him. We used to sow from three pecks to a bushel 

 per acre, of seed, and we used to call ten bushels of rye to 

 the acre a fair crop on old fields — didn't grumble if we got 

 eight, but seven was " rather slim." Twelve bushels was 

 *' first rate," fifteen bushels was " stout," and generally meant 

 newish land or land in better heart that had been summer- 

 fallowed. I've heard of twenty bushels to the acre where 

 land had been manured and prepared for grass, but it was not 

 considered so very profitable, for the straw was too heavy to 

 cut with a cradle, no reaping machine was to be had and 

 reaping by hand was expensive, with old country labor that 

 could spend a day in reaping and binding a quarter of an 

 acre. There has been one well-attested instance in town of a 

 harvest of forty bushels per acre, through the thorough til- 

 lage and generous culture of an Irishman and a manufac- 

 turer. And a bit of warm, sandy land, within a few rods of 

 my door, cleared of shrub-oaks and pines, very generously 

 dunged, used as an early garden one season, and sowed with 

 rye in August, gave a yield at the rate of something more 

 than forty bushels per acre. I mention these things to show 

 that rye is not so meagre in production as it is popularly sup- 

 posed to be. The former generation tell big stories of the 

 prowess of some of the muckle harvesters of old times. The 

 elder B — boys used to cut and bind their two acres of rye 



