«ULTURE AND PREPARATION OF HEMP. 155 



and increasing it on hemp and flax, would encourage the be on the pro- 

 growth j but if given on the number of acres sown, the grower, nieTs'ur"°of the 

 as his ground would be in high order for a crop of turnips and land, 

 wheat after, might be careless about his crop of hemp, as the 

 bounty, to be worth notice, must be worth more than the vahie 

 of the seed in common years and iht; labour of sowing. 



Hemp in this county and the next is never sown in new nax sown o« 

 ground fresh broke up, but flax always by choice, when fresh "^^ ground, 

 ground can be got, Mr. John Pit field is going to break op P ^<^ • 

 great part of the West Clift at Bridport Harbour, and sow it 

 with flax this season. The writer, while on the subject of 

 hemp, is led to mention, that when travelling in the year 

 1792, in the province of Massachusets, near Boston, in North Hemp sown 

 America, he was assured that considerable quantities of hemp thTsame^land 

 were raised in the township of Sunberry, about ten miles from 

 Boston ; and that it was always raised on the same ground 

 every year, no other crop being sown in their hemp lands, and 

 that it was manured every year, at the rate of about ten tons of 

 manure to the acre of hemp. Respecting seed, he cannot 

 learn that there is any for sale at Bridport, with the buyers who 

 purchase it up for the growers at the hemp harvest, and he 

 eiipects that very little can be got from the growers round here. 

 Somersetshire is a more likely place to get it, as he has knov?n 

 some of the hemp farmers to have upwards of a hundred acres • 



of hemp in one season. Round this they generally are only in 

 a small way. A change of hemp-seed is much wanted in qi^^^„ c , 

 i^onierset and Dorset. Trials have been made two or three wanted, 

 times to get it from Russia, but it is nOt possible to get new 

 leed from the interior early enough in the fall at the shipping 

 'ports, and some old seed which has been shipped has not an- 

 swered the purpose ; if new could have been got, it would as 

 generally have been used for a change, as the new Riga barrel . 

 iliax seed is by the flax-growers. As the seed sown in Russia Suggfcstlonis 

 tvas considered a good sample, and its appearance much liked, f"r obtaining 

 possibly it might, at a future period, be obtained in the fall 

 "from Odessa, or some other port on the Black Sea; as it is 

 'understood that a good deal of henip sJiipped at Riga and St. 

 l^etersburgh grows much nearer to the Black Sea than the Bal- 

 '"ticj or possibly the seed of the Italian hemp raised in the 

 neighbourhood of Bologna, or that of America, might b<j 

 ' obtained 



