344 
On the St. Johns-Day Rye. 
a very favourable impression of its utility as a food for ewes and 
lambs. 
Living in a country w^here water-meadows are in great perfec- 
tion, he challenges any occupier of water-meadows, in 1848, to 
carry an equal quantity of stock on a limited breadth of the best 
watered or dry meadow, to that which the author will carry on a 
like breadth of St. John's-day rye, at any periods between the first 
day of January and the first day of May ; the period for stocking 
one half of the ground to be chosen by the one party, the period 
for stocking the other half to be chosen by the other party. 
In order, however, to obtain the full advantage of the produc- 
tiveness of this crop, some conditions must be observed. In the 
first place, if the farmer wishes for a full crop of any bulky plant, 
he must not sow it on an impoverished soil, or he will be disap- 
pointed. And such would be the case with this. But if he will 
prepare his land with as reasonable a share of manure for this 
plant as he would for turnips or wheat, he will find a return not 
inferior in value to that which either of those plants will yield 
him in the south-western counties of England. And the supply 
comes in at a })eriod when, of all times of the year, green-meat is 
the most difficult to attain; when the turnips are exhausted, or 
have run to seed, when the swedes are consumed, the hayricks 
shrunk, the horses tired of dry food, the cows requiring a moist 
food to sustain their milk, and the lambs clamorous for some- 
thing juicy. Another condition is, that the cultivator must give 
the plant time enough to grow. The author cannot too strongly 
inculcate that, in order to obtain the true value of this plant, it is 
requisite to sow it about the time of the summer solstice ; and 
that if you postpone the sowing until the latter end of summer or 
the autumn, you obtain a much inferior produce, and that the 
plant, in truth, is not then worth sowing. Many, thinking they 
have all the year before them, will not sow it early in summer, 
but deler the sowing to a later season, and are consequently dis- 
appointed in the produce, and condemn the plant as worthless. 
Some have expressed a fear that, if sown thus early, the rye would 
throw up its culms before the winter, and the crop be lost ; but 
the author has never once seen a single plant of the genuine St. 
John's-day rye to spindle before the following spring. Some, 
hearing that it ought to be sown so early, think that no jjlant wdl 
repay so long an occupation of the ground, and that on this 
account it is not worth sowing. But such persons should consider 
that there are other ])lants which require, and will repay, an 
equally long occupation of the ground. On the elevated oolitic 
table-land called the Cotswold Hills, in Gloucestersliire, the 
young wheat already come up, and the ripening wheat, not yet 
harvested, are currently to be seen growing side by side in ad- 
