66 ESSEX SEED CORN 



the first pods had dropped off, so that a good many of 

 the commercial stocks are now raised in California. But 

 so important is it to rogue out all plants departing 

 from the type, and also to catch up the occasional 

 " mutations " of distinct merit, that the best seedsmen 

 prefer to raise their stocks in England where they can 

 keep them under observation. 



Our road then lay through the Roothings, that string 

 of villages called Roding which lie round about the 

 little river of the same name, a country of heavy 

 clay land of the kind that is usually associated with 

 " derelict " Essex. But this country never fell out 

 of cultivation, nor had it been let down to grass 

 and given up to milk production, by which means 

 so much of the once derelict land has since been 

 brought back into profitable use. It is still very 

 largely plough land, farmed in a conservative fashion 

 in medium-sized holdings. The rotation is one of the 

 most primitive beans, wheat, barley with a bare 

 fallow not infrequently ; very few roots are grown, and 

 those always mangolds ; fields of red clover or other 

 seeds are also rarely seen. Such a course of cropping 

 does not permit of keeping much stock, but it gives a 

 crop to sell off the land every year, except when the 

 need of cleaning and re-establishing a tilth calls for a 

 bare summer's fallow, a practice which can only be 

 justified on a strong soil in a dry climate. Wild oats 

 seemed the most characteristic weed, and, with the 

 superabundant thistles, bulked all too largely in some 

 of the corn crops. Two wet growing seasons had left 

 the East of England desperately full of thistles, to the 

 extent sometimes of interfering with the harvesting of 

 the barley crop, so slowly do they dry when they form 

 any considerable proportion of the sheaves. 



A little farther north we visited another farm, rather 



