52 SPECIALIST FARMING: HOPS AND FRUIT 



the plants within the radius of the hose. Nor does 

 one spraying suffice. Prior to our visit there had been 

 a slight but persistent attack of aphis, and our host 

 had kept his machines at work almost continuously 

 from the middle of June, some pieces having been 

 washed over half a dozen times. A fungoid disease 

 is also much dreaded, and was being combated by 

 dusting the whole plant over with flowers of sulphur 

 distributed by a machine which blew the sulphur out 

 in a great cloud as it was drawn along the alleys. 

 The hops are picked early in September, when nearly 

 three hundred families, say, a thousand people includ- 

 ing the children, would be housed on the farm, in the 

 rows of wooden huts we saw here and there in the 

 grass fields. These pickers are not always an easy 

 team to drive ; but in the main they are composed of 

 respectable families who are engaged year after year 

 on the same farm, and there obtain good wages and 

 a health-giving month in the open air. Fine weather 

 is the desideratum ; in heavy rain the pickers cannot 

 be expected to continue at work, the huts are only 

 designed for sleeping in, the men get off to the public- 

 houses, and strikes, riots, and trouble of all kinds 

 follow. The hop-grower's anxieties at that time are 

 not confined to his pickers ; his hops have to be dried 

 in the oast houses, of which we have spoken, where 

 they are laid out for ten hours or so on a horsehair 

 cloth some i 2 ft. to 1 6 ft. above a fire of charcoal or 

 anthracite, so that a continuous current of hot air 

 passes through them. In this drying process they can 

 easily have their market value reduced by one-half, 

 and even a slight error in the management of the fires 

 will knock several shillings a hundredweight off the 

 price. Our host possessed various patent kilns, very 

 unpicturesque beside the old roundels of brick and red 



