502 Farming of the North Riding of Yorkshire. 
but who always shear the corn — as being perfect models. The 
rain much sooner penetrates the mown sheaves, but it must also 
be admitted that so do the drying winds ; and we believe the 
balance of chances is in favour of mowing corn, as regards safe 
and early harvests. 
The corn-stacks are by no means large — the contents varying 
from 5 to 7 quarters in one stack. As a large proportion of the 
wheat remains unthrashed till the spring, it is usually carefully 
stacked, and temporarily covered with straw during the harvest, 
until time can be had to thatch the whole. Harvest wages vary 
from 15s. to 18s. per week, with meat and allowance for the month 
of harvest. Little regard is paid to the hours of labour, and in 
a fine season it is far from uncommon to work from six in the 
morning to ten at night ; and nothing can exceed the hilarity and 
merriment of the noisy groups working away by moonlight, well 
knowing how much of the happiness and plenty of themselves 
and their families depends on the harvest being gathered in 
safety. 
No sooner is the stubble cleared by the hand or horse rake, and 
the rakings collected, and when dried in heaps, tied up in 
bundles or carried away loose, than the best cultivators commence 
cleaning the stubbles for the subsequent crop. The minute divi- 
sion of the soils on these sandstone series, accompanied by great 
porosity, causes them to have a strange tendency to grow rapidly 
to couch, quitch, or twitch, as this best of all known weeds is 
variously called ; and no sooner have they the stimulus of a 
plentiful supply of air by the removal of the crops, than they 
throw rootlets directly down in the soil, and the longer they are 
exposed, the deeper the roots will go. If one of these stubbles 
is examined, so soon as the corn is cut, the couch will be found 
very near the surface, whereas a month afterwards it will be found 
several inches deeper, and the whole of the rootlets tending 
directly downwards. 
Hence, instead of the old tiresome process of ploughing deep, 
leaving this to dry, and again cross-ploughing — burying, in fact, 
the root-weeds in order to work them up again, and thus wasting 
all the fine weather in primary operations — a Ducie scarifier, or 
some other adaptation of a similar description (of which a great 
variety is now manufactured in the county by Mr. Busby, Mr. 
Barratt, Mr. Barker, and others), is set at some 3 to 5 inches 
deep ; and loosening just so much of the earth as is necessary to 
enable the cultivator to get the plant shaken out of the soil, the 
whole being kept at the top, the harrows are set to work, and this 
brings us to the preparation for 
Turnips. — On the cleanness of the land from weeds, or the 
contrary, depends the degree of clearing necessary to fit the land 
