YALE AGRICULTURAL LECTURES. 127 



but little else eaten, it has been a mystery among our most 

 acute financiers how the people paid for all this " boughten 

 flour/' But within the past six or eight years, matters in 

 this respect have greatly mended, in consequence of many of 

 our New Hampshire farmers having turned their attention to 

 the culture of winter wheat, in which most of them have been 

 very successful. 



In the summer of 1852, the son of his (Mr. Bartlett's) neigh 

 bor was in western New York, and was so pleased with the 

 fields of winter wheat, that he took home with him four 

 teen quarts of the " bald " variety of white wheat grown there. 

 This was sown on about one-third of an acre of dry, loamy 

 land. From a combination of favorable circumstances, it yield 

 ed sixteen bushels of prime wheat, at the rate of forty-eight 

 bushels per acre. Nearly all of the sixteen bushels was readi 

 ly sold for seed at $3 per bushel, and as was to be expected, 

 under the excitement and the entire ignorance of its proper 

 culture by the farmers, some succeeded well, while others 

 made a partial or total failure. In 1853, he sowed one bushel 

 on light, pine land, from which a crop of beans had been re 

 moved at the time of sowing the wheat, he applying to the land 

 one hundred and fifty pounds of Peruvian guano. The wheat 

 was so\vn 20th of September, at least twenty-five days too' late. 

 The yield was about nine bushels. For the five past years, he 

 has been experimenting with winter wheat on a variety of 

 soils, and with different manures. He has grown it on inter 

 vale lands, on hills, on light, dry soils, and stiff, heavy ones. 

 These last, however, have always been ridged up, turnpike 

 like, and the dead-furrows well cleaned out to drain off the 

 water. Sometimes the wheat has been sown on a newly in 

 verted timothy sod ; at other times on a clover ley, and upon 

 wheat and oat stubble. In every instance the land has been 

 pretty liberally manured with farmyard manure, or guano. 

 During the six or seven years he has grown it, it has suffered 

 but very little from winter-killing, nor has it been injured to 



