THE WHEAT CTJLTmiST. 



293 



enough. Let me repeat the oft-reiterated suggestion, 

 that wheat, whether winter or spring grain, requires a 

 kind of mineral manure that will reproduce grain^ and 

 not straw. 



Joseph Harris, of Rochester, I^ew York, writes on 

 this subject : " The introduction of turnip culture and 

 drill husbandry into England banished summer fallows 

 from all but the heaviest clay soils. There was good 

 reason for this : the turnips required and received extra 

 cultivation. As soon as the wheat crop is harvested, 

 the land is scarified and ploughed in the autumn, and 

 two or three times in the spring, and rolled and har- 

 rowed, and scarified, till it is as free from weeds and as 

 mellow as an ash heap ; then the turnips are sown in 

 drills from two to two and a half feet apart. The plants 

 are singled out by hand-hoes in the rows, from twelve 

 to fifteen inches apart, and the horse-hoe is kept con- 

 stantly going between the rows, and the haud-hoe when- 

 ever necessary. In this way the land is as efiectually 

 cleaned and mellowed as if it had been summer-fallowed. 

 Hence turnips have been appropriately termed a ' fal- 

 low crop.' But we have as yet no such fallow crop in 

 America. I am aware that Indian corn is sometimes 

 called a ' fallow crop,' because, like turnips, it admits 

 the use of the horse-hoe ; but it is not, strictly speaking, 

 a fallow or renovating crop, because it impoverishes the 

 soil of the same plant food as the wheat crop requires. 

 So much has been said in England against summer fal- 

 lows, and these opinions have been reiterated so often 

 by the agricultural press of this country, for the last 

 thirty years, that there is a very general opinion that 

 summer fallows are unnecessary. This impression, while 

 it may have done some good, has also done considerable 



