250 EUROPEAN AGRICULTURE. 



culty of keeping the crop clean, which is of the highest impor 

 tance, where a wheat crop is to follow. They are usually drilled 

 ten or twelve inches asunder, and the intervals hoed ; and some 

 times two feet, or two feet and a half, apart, and then carefully 

 cultivated between the rows. The land, in such case, is com 

 monly highly manured, the manure being rotted barn manure, 

 spread and ploughed in; and, being kept as clean from weeds as 

 possible, there is a fine preparation for wheat. In this way, 

 wheat and beans are made to alternate on the same land for 

 years, with advantage ; though the land should be strong, to bear 

 so severe usage, and the bean crop must be liberally manured. 

 The rotation often adopted is, turnips, barley, clover, beans, 

 wheat ; where the land is very rich, it is, turnips, barley, clover, 

 oats, beans, wheat, beans. The quantity of seed sown by 

 drill for beans is two and a half and three bushels. Peas are 

 sometimes sown with beans for a green crop, for the purpose of 

 soiling ; in which case, three bushels of beans and two of peas are 

 sown ; and this produces a nutritious and well-relished food for 

 cattle and for pigs. Of crops which ripen their seeds few are 

 less exhausting to the soil than beans. Beans, at harvest, are 

 shocked in the field until dry, and then placed in stack to be, 

 after a while, threshed out, either by flail or by a machine. 

 The fodder, cut up with other fodder, in the spring of the year, 

 is eaten by stock. Caution is advised in giving horses new 

 beans, as they are very likely to founder them. The crop of 

 beans here is certainly most valuable, in a climate where Indian 

 corn will not grow ; but it seems, in all respects, much inferior to 

 that inestimable and useful product, the value of which, in my 

 estimation, and the more I see of foreign husbandry, is contin 

 ually rising, The small, white, kidney or round bean, so com 

 mon with us, and so much eaten in some parts of the country, is 

 not, within my observation, grown or used here. 



I tried the cultivation of English horse-beans more than once 

 in the United States ; but they were always, in the time of flow 

 ering, destroyed by a small, black fly, which they seemed to 

 attract in an extraordinary degree, and which stripped the stems 

 completely of their foliage. 



6. PEAS do not appear to be extensively cultivated in England, 

 as a field crop. The yield, when successful, varies from twenty 



