On Green or Fodder Crops. 
149 
grass seeds, such as are too often employed, by some chance come 
under scientific observation. The seeds of couch-grass so much 
resemble common rye-grass to the common eye, and are so often 
ripened with it when a crop is saved on a not very clean farm, 
that occupiers of land who buy of one another propagate the 
pest unknowingly, and yet on a wholesale scale. Most of the 
leading seed establishments have specialties in rare kinds, and 
Messrs. Sutton and Sons write of their Improved Italian that " it 
is very distinct in its character and seed from any other rye-grass, 
and as it is not strictly perennial in habit, it is more suitable for 
alternate husbandry and producing early feed in the spring for 
sheep and cattle than for use in permanent pastures. It is 
especially useful on account of its rapid growth." 
Double crops, either of two kinds of green produce grown 
together, or a green crop between rows of beans or peas, are not 
at all general, although in the hands of skilled cultivators they 
have often been attended with a large measure of success. A 
novel and ingenious way of obtaining cheaply a large stock of 
kohl-rabi plants is that of mixing up a small proportion of the 
seed with the mangold-wurzel seed before it is deposited by 
the drill. The plants serve the double object for filling out 
the blank spots where the mangolds fail, kohl bearing trans- 
planting so much better than young mangold plants, and for 
transference to other lands. The kohl plants left in the mangold 
field are never found to injure the main crop, as the mangolds 
overtop the kohls while together ; the latter, however, after the 
former have been lifted, will continue to grow throughout- the 
ensuing winter if allowed to stand, and not unfrequently mature 
a considerable quantity of keep. 
Even when kohl-rabi is not habitually grown it is often found 
serviceable to raise young plants in a nursery-bed purposely to 
have stock to plant out into the fields of swedes, which are too 
thin of plants, or happen in certain spots to be bare. Mr. C. 
Kent, who grows from 120 to 140 acres of mangolds, swedes, 
and turnips, annually, always finds it advantageous to have a 
reserve of kohl plants to fill up the crops where necessary. He 
says : — " Kohl-rabi is useful as a filling-up plant when other 
crops, especially swedes, are thin." 
Mr. Robert Russell invariably sows the seed either of 
thousand-headed kale, sprouting broccoli, or turnips between 
the rows of beans and peas after the last horse-hoeing, and 
many other farmers cultivate common turnips among beans and 
peas. Mr. J. Treadwell writes to me as follows : — 
"I generally get a good deal of feed by a catch crop of turnips grown 
amongst the peas and winter beans. I drill in about 1 lb. of yellow Tankard 
turnip seed to the acre as soon as peas or beans are hoed the last time, and as 
