60 SPECIALIST FARMING: HOPS AND FRUIT 



younger men who are setting up fruit-growing are 

 rather shy of Kent and seek other counties. As a 

 cultivator, the Kentish fruit-grower need fear no rivals ; 

 as a packer he is behind the times, for, speaking 

 generally, he does not grade his fruit but sends it 

 off to market in unattractive baskets sieves and 

 half-sieves which have to be returned. Of the ad- 

 ventures of returned empties on the South-Eastern 

 Railway many lurid tales are told, of search parties 

 taking the line section by section, of submerged 

 trucks full of baskets that wash up in distant stations 

 and there lie stranded in the sidings ; but such is 

 the force of long custom that the Kentish grower has 

 not yet been converted to the value of non-returnable 

 packages, which neither bring back disease nor mean 

 idle capital. 



Hops and fruit have always absorbed the best 

 energies of Kentish agriculture, and the ordinary 

 stock and corn men in the other parts of the county 

 fall rather below the general average in their manage- 

 ment. Some very good wheat and barley are grown 

 in East Kent ; in particular the Isle of Thanet, where 

 the chalk is near the surface and the country takes 

 an open, rolling down-like aspect once more, possesses 

 considerable local reputation for its barley, which is 

 not uncommonly grown for several years in succession 

 on an old lucerne or sainfoin ley. In 1910 East Kent 

 crops, even in the favoured districts, were only in- 

 different, for the distribution of pressure had been 

 such as to give this usually very dry strip of country 

 more rainfall than the Midlands and the inland 

 districts farther west. An exceptionally wet winter 

 had been followed by a summer of continual thunder- 

 storms ; the wheat was blighted and seemed likely 

 to thresh out badly, and though oats and barley 



