268 AN AMERICAN FARMER IX ENGLAND. 



season with one of the instruments described at page 85 ; in the 

 spring, plowed again, (eight inches deep,) harrowed fine and 

 smooth, thrown into ridges with double mould-board plow, rolled, 

 and finally drilled with a two horse machine that deposits and 

 covers manure and seed together. The manure is ground bones, 

 costing in Hereford 60 cents a bushel, mixed with sifted coal- 

 ashes. The expense of this application is about $12 an acre, 

 but it must be remembered that the ground is already in high 

 condition. The drills are thirty inches apart. The crop is prin- 

 cipally used to fatten sheep, of which 500 are kept on the farm ; 

 the breed, Cotswold and Leicester. 



We next went to a paddock in which were six Cotswold "tups" 

 (bucks), as handsome sheep (of their kind) as I ever saw. One 

 of them I caught and measured : girth behind the shoulders, ex- 

 actly five feet ; length from muzzle to tail, four feet and eleven 

 inches. 



Then to the wheat, of which there was also about one hundred 

 acres, part after turnips and part after potatoes: the former, 

 which had been boned, looked the best. A part of the land had 

 been prepared by a presser (a corrugated roller used to give 

 solidity to light soils), and this was decidedly superior to the 

 remainder. Most of the wheat was put in with drilling machines, 

 of which there were two used, one sowing at greater intervals 

 than the other. Some of the wheat upon the pressed land, after 

 turnips, was the finest we have seen. The farmer expected it to 

 yield forty bushels of seventy pounds each, but would consider an 

 average of thirty, from the hundred acres, a very good crop. 

 He said the average crop of the county was thought to be but 

 eighteen and a half bushels. 



We afterwards walked through some pasture and a grass-field, 

 and examined the hay in stacks; mostly rye-grass. The hay- 

 fields yielded one to two and a quarter tons an acre, the average 



