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XIX. — Oil the Cultivation of Beans and Peas. By R. Vallentine, 
of Burcott Lodge, Leighton Buzzard. 
Prize Essay. 
In a practical Essay of this kind I do not consider it advisable — 
even if much better qualified — to enter into a chemical definition 
of the soils hereafter mentioned, nor to attempt a botanical 
description of the different kinds of beans and peas. There have 
already appeared so many able and elaborate papers on these 
matters in the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society, that 
every reader must have had ample opportunity for obtaining such 
information. All ortlinary farmers know that soils which par- 
take more of clay than sand are called clay, or heavy soils, and 
those soils which contain the greatest proportion of sand, or 
light calcareous matter, are called light soils. Those, again, 
which contain an equal, or nearly an equal proportion of clay 
and sand, are known as loams. These are the principal distinc- 
tions which I shall adhere to, or may be supposed to mean, 
when discussing the cultivation of benns and peas. 
The history of beans and peas informs us that this kind of pulse 
was extensively cultivated and held in high estimation in the 
earliest ages. Beans were cultivated, as they still are, chiefly on 
heavy soils, and peas on soils more or less light. At the present 
time beans are principally grown on the stiff clay soils of Eng- 
land, at pretty regular intervals of three or four years in a rota- 
tion. On light soils beans are seldom grown in a regular 
rota^tion, and are only substituted as a kind of catch crop instead 
of roots, &c. Peas are occasionally grown instead of a cereal 
crop, for the purpose of being followed, in the same season as 
they are sown, with late turnips. The rotation of crops on 
heavy soils where beans hold a constant place is thus : — 1st. 
Fallow dunged for wheat ; 2nd. Beans; 3rd. Fallow again, and 
so on. This was at one time almost the universal custom on 
stiff clays, so that with low rents and little expense for cultiva- 
tion, two crops in three years made a living return to the 
husbandman. It is well known tliat during the continuation of 
high prices, low rents, few taxes, little labour, and that at a 
cheap rate, tiiere was no difficulty for a very ordinar}' farmer to 
pursue such a course, and even make money by it. The wheat 
was sown broadcast, or ploughed in, the beans the same, and 
neither crop received any hoeing or weeding during their 
grov/th ; and hence the filthy state the land usually got into, and 
the necessity for a naked summer fallow to destroy the accumu- 
lated weeds hy repeated plougtiings, &c. The course mentioned 
very generally obtained in Huntingdon, Berks, Bedford, and 
