90 SPECIALIST FARMING POTATOES 



potatoes, both dormant as usual and others sprouted 

 in boxes, to which end we saw the boxes being filled 

 with tubers of the right size as they were gathered 

 in the field. This intensive potato-growing employs 

 a great amount of labour; for, in addition to the 

 ordinary operations of cultivation and the planting 

 and picking, the plants are sprayed in some cases 

 three or four times during the season with Bordeaux 

 mixture and other copper preparations in order to 

 ward off disease. Women and children are largely 

 employed in the planting and gathering, and in this 

 district the labour was chiefly obtained locally, thus 

 avoiding the great influx of casuals which marks the 

 harvest in other potato-growing districts. In other 

 respects our host's farming followed a more normal 

 course, though on all sides one saw signs of the great 

 pitch of fertility to which the land had been raised. 

 The oats which followed the potatoes were exception- 

 ally heavy crops so as to be laid in nearly every case, 

 while the wheat following the oats, though standing up 

 better, had much of the rough and dingy appearance 

 that we had associated with an excess of nitrogen 

 in the soil on the black land. Barley was little 

 grown, but the beans, which alternate with wheat 

 once in every six years or so, were again producing 

 very heavy crops. Indeed, on this land any crop can 

 be grown pretty well up to its maximum yield in Great 

 Britain. The free working soil was of the same char- 

 acter as that near Wisbech, and similar in almost 

 every essential respect to the deep brick earths we had 

 seen below Chichester and the other band of brick 

 earth on which the best of the Kentish fruit is grown. 

 Its distinguishing feature is not any chemical richness 

 nor the presence of any particular substance that is 

 lacking in ordinary soils ; it is its smooth, even 



