CHAPTER XII 



Insect Pests and Diseases 



OLD meadow land is not at all good for Sweet Peas, that is, in the 

 first year of taking it in from pasture. After it has been used for 

 another crop and lain fallow for a while, it makes excellent Sweet 

 Pea soil. I know that many people hold a contrary opinion, and 

 argue that as stock has fed on the ground for years it must, of 

 necessity, be rich in manurial constituents. This I grant, but the 

 benefits of the manurial deposit are far more than outweighed 

 by the immense number of insect and animal pests always present 

 in such land. Of these 



Wire-worms, Leather Jackets, and Slugs are sure to be 

 abundant. Cockchafer grubs, too, may be present, and one or two 

 of these will eat more plants in a week than the cultivator can grow 

 in a month. Millipedes are also likely to be lying in wait to 

 complete the work of destruction that other pests begin, and that 

 omnivorous devourer of all garden stuff, the caterpillar of the 

 cabbage moth. But most of the above are well known and of good 

 size. Not so another pest, or perhaps two other pests, which are 

 far from uncommon on newly broken grass land. These are the 



Stem Eelworm and White Worm. These do a great deal 

 of harm to Sweet Peas. The stem eelworm is responsible for that 

 scourge of the farmer, the clover sickness, and its presence in 

 pasture land is more or less regulated by the quantity of clover 

 in the grass. That the clover and the Sweet Pea are allied 

 is common knowledge, so that the fact that a pest which attacks one 

 should also attack the other need cause no surprise ; what does 

 cause surprise is the terrible amount of damage which such tiny pests 

 can do. They are not visible to the naked eye. The rate at which 

 a large, healthy plant will collapse after attack is all but astounding. 

 The white worm shall I say fortunately 1 is much larger and can 

 be readily detected in the tissue of the stem attacked. Unlike the 

 eelworm, it is supposed only to attack vegetation already in process 

 of decay, generally through some other pest's attack ; whether this 



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