per acre might be sufficient. For fine fiber I would recommend 

 two and one-half to three bushels per acre (160 to 180 pounds.) 



SCAFFOLDING OR LANDERN. 



Here we come to another interesting fundamental principle 

 in European practice (originally adopted in Belgium) where the 

 finest possible fiber was required, such as is adapted to the 

 manufacture of "French Batiste" and the finest hand-made 

 "Brussels Lace," and has been brought to such gossimer fine- 

 ness that the fiber costs more than the actual value of the land 

 upon which it has been grown and the Belgian Nuns were 

 compelled to work it in damp cellars. The Belgian system of 

 "Landern" was so cumbersome as to be totally unadapted to our 

 American ideas. In the first place they sowed three and one- 

 half and even four and one-half bushels to the acre, and the 

 very best and plumpest quality. Sowing so thickly of course 

 had the effect of making the straw so fine and tall that it was 

 unable to stand up against heavy rain or hail storms 

 and to prevent this calamity, the growers drove posts into the 

 ground about three or four feet high, and with poles and boards 

 constructed a scaffold about eighteen or twenty-four inches from 

 the ground. They then cut piles of birch twigs, spreading them 

 on the ground and weighting them down with rocks and poles 

 in order that they would dry in as flat a sheet as possible. After 

 the seed was sown and the twigs dried in a mat, they were trans- 

 ferred to the top of the scaffold, as the straw grew it penetrated 

 through the meshes of this mat of fibrous birch twigs which 

 furnished the necessary support from being lodged by storms. 



This doubtless was too cumbrous for the American disposi- 

 tion to cross lots and cut corners and get there all the same. How 

 was I to give this difficulty a place in my Americanized system 

 of fiber culture? After some study of the conditions to be met, 

 I struck a feasible and simple course of procedure. Away back in 

 the early forties (in my first kidhood) we used to plant potatoes in 

 narrow beds all down the length of the field with narrow trenches 

 between. The beds were generally three or four feet wide and 

 the intervening trenches about twelve or eighteen inches wide. 

 It was a simple matter to drive suitable forked stakes after 

 the seed was sown in the beds and stretch common poultry 

 netting along over the length of the bed and supported by the 

 uprights. In localities subject to sudden squalls or hail storms 

 a second additional strip of wire netting might be placed twelve 

 inches higher up by making a still more efficacious support to 

 prevent the flax being beaten down. This process is vastly more 

 economical; when harvest time comes the stalks can be cut 

 just above the roots with a sharp machete or other knife 

 and the straw drawn up through the wire netting and rolled in 

 compact bundles and stored from season to season indefinitely 

 and the upright posts pulled up and stored as hop poles are 

 stored from year to year for future use and the flax straw tied 

 in usual bundles for retting. 



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