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II. — On Wldte Mustard. By Thomas Cooke Burroughes. 
Prize Essay. 
The cultivation of white mustard as a fallow crop, either for 
sheep- feed or to be ploughed in as a green manure, may be said 
to be a new system in British agriculture : for although it has been 
long since used with success by some few experimental farmers, 
yet the practice of it has never been so general as in the last two 
years, and especially in the summer of 1845, when numerous 
patches and some large pieces of white mustard might be seen 
growing in almost every parish where the soil was adapted to its 
cultivation. 
The sound ox)[y " mustard'' has, I believe, deterred many 
farmers from growing it, as some persons are apt to confound the 
white mustard with the black mustard (or brown mustard, as it is 
called in some parts). The former plant — the subject of this 
essay — is that which is grown in our gardens to use as a salad, 
and is the " Sinapis Alba;" and the latter is the " Sinapis Nigra" 
of Linna?us. 
The black mustard is a more exhausting plant to the soil than 
white mustard, and may well be shunned by all good farmers who 
wish to keep their land clean ; as the seed of this plant, if allowed 
to come to maturity and shelled upon the ground, will come up in 
after years to the great detriment of the succeeding corn-crops ; 
for, like the charlock seed, it will rea^ain in the soil for ages unin- 
jured, and, when brought near the surface by cultivation, will 
vegetate in abundance. 
White mustard is a far more harmless plant, and, if allowed 
even to shed its seed, vegetates so quickly and with the slightest 
moisture, even upon the surface of the soil, and is so easily destroyed 
by frosts, that even when grown as a seed-crop but few of its spe- 
cies are found in the succeeding crop, if a winter intervene. 
Having described the nature of the two sorts of mustard, I now 
proceed to the following points required in this Essay upon white 
mustard. 
No. 1. — Quality of Land on which sown. 
I consider there is scarcely a soil, however poor (provided the 
climate be adapted to it), upon which white mustard will not 
gn)w ; but, of course, like all other plants, its luxuriance of growth 
will be according to the fertility of the soil, provided it be rendered 
in a fit state to receive the seed. A good friable turnip-soil, ca- 
pable of producing good crops of wheat, with a dry subsoil, is well 
adapted to its growth ; and also peat-soils, upon which it flourishes 
with extreme luxuriance. 
