436 
Half-a-dozen English Sewage Farms. 
tempted on occasion to apply a sewage dressing during a 
drought, where under ordinary circumstances it might be mis- 
chievous. Even he, however, will for the most part confine 
himself to Italian rye-grass and a few other green crops on his 
sewaged plot, and depend on the manure from the cattle fed on the 
sewaged grass and mangel-wurzel, for distributing the fertilising 
influence at his command over the rest of his land. On wholly 
sewaged farms the tenants will apply the bulk of the sewage to 
Italian rye-grass, and occasionally to mangels, cabbages, and other 
growing green crops, during summer, and to fallow-land for 
mangels, cabbages, and potatoes during winter, trusting the land 
to do what it can at that time to extract and store up for next 
summer's use the fertilising matters which are then spread 
throughout it. At Wrexham, where Colonel A. Jones makes his 
sewage farm profitable, the market-garden plot is one of the most 
productive fields he has. And at Aldershot, where Mr. Black- 
burn also finds sewage farming profitable, the large area in 
potatoes grown every year upon what is naturally a worthless sand 
yields, after repeated winter sewagings, one of the largest items 
of his income. At Barking, where cabbages, and other garden 
crops, and mangel-wurzels are largely and profitably grown, the 
dependence is on occasional dressings during the summer 
when the plants are in full growth and want feeding, not at all 
on winter dressings, which indeed are not forced on them as 
they are on the farms below ordinary towns ; they pump only 
when they want to do so, and confine themselves therefore to 
such times as suit their crops. 
And here we come to the third lesson which these farms teach, 
and which cannot be too strongly impressed upon the sewage- 
farmer. The selection of such crops for growth as alone can 
make good use of such a dilute manure must be hedged within 
still narrower limits ; and in the case even of a crop which may 
be sanctioned by the second rule of conduct, just referred to, 
we must resolutely and promptly condemn it and abandon 
it as soon as it has lost its fitness or its power. This caution 
applies chiefly, and, so far as I know, exclusively to Italian 
rye-grass, which is often seen on sewage-farms even in its 
second year, and still more in its third year, utterly effete and 
incapable ; although in its first year, when receiving no better 
or more abundant feeding, it was enormously productive. Mr. 
H. J. Little was quite right in pointing out the blunder whicli 
Italian rye-grass growers often commit on sewage-farms ol 
keeping it too long. There is nothing more beautiful of its kind 
— nothing more convincing of the extraordinarily fertilising 
agency which we have in sewage — than a field of Italian -rye- 
