OF FALLOWING. 245 



manure, than the same land would have done if no fallow had 

 taken place. Mr Somner farther thinks, that when the 

 land is in grass, stock is so much fonder of it, that in the 

 same field, the land that has been fallowed will be eat bare, 

 when the other is neglected; an opinion which I under- 

 stand is a very general one with Scotch farmers. The land 

 also is much easier kept clean, and easier ploughed and har- 

 rowed during the rest of the rotation. Clay soils in gene- 

 ral are wet : Ploughing such lands, therefore, a second fur- 

 row in spring, (which must be the case occasionally where 

 fallowing is neglected), is often attended with very injurious 

 consequences ; whereas, after a proper fallow, one furrow, 

 judiciously given, is much safer, and in most cases will be 

 sufficient for each crop in the rotation. Fallowing seems 

 to have the property of making clay land tender and mel- 

 low, and of improving rather than exhausting it. On such 

 soils, a well-prepared fallow may be justly called "the 

 groundwork of good husbandry" 



On the subject of fallows, the late Mr Scott of Craig- 

 lockhart, one of the most intelligent and experienced farm- 

 ers in Scotland, was decidedly of opinion, that naked fal- 

 lows, in many cases, were indispensably necessary. He as- 

 serted, that stiff stubborn tilly land, intended for a wheat 

 crop, never could be sufficiently pulverized, without under- 

 going that process, and that the manure applied could not 

 operate with the same effect, when under a drilled crop, as 

 when under a fallow. The consequences frequently were, 

 that the crop^of wheat, after the fallow, more than equalled, 

 both the drilled crop, and the one that succeeded it ; and 

 what is of great importance, the land which had been sum- 

 mer-fallowed, was in better order, and in a higher state of 

 productiveness, than the land which had carried a drilled 

 crop. He contended, therefore, that moist or stiff soils, 

 over-run with weeds, which propagate from the roots* 



