69 
sometimes grown on the lighter varieties, but it is 
coarse in quality. The soil is too retentive for turnips, 
and when the course is fallow, wheat, beans, and oats, 
the land is occupied by three exhausting and only one 
restorative crop, so that it is cropped more severely 
than some of the superior qualities of land, which only 
increases its poverty. The want of turnips and natural 
feeding grass upon which to maintain stock, verifies 
the maxim, " no food no cattle, no cattle no dung, no 
dung no corn," concerning this land. Deep draining 
of twenty-two inches at least, thorough-draining by 
tiles, is little performed, (perhaps i of the land is not 
drained at all,) and in no instance is it accompanied by 
deep ploughing. A writer in the Doncaster Farmer's 
Journal of 26th Sept., 1840, as a means of improving 
these poor clay lands, recommends a particular 
rotation of crops. Of them, he says that the quantity of 
turnip land is small, or none, and the scanty produce 
obtained from the lands affords a very limited supply of 
dung from the want of green crops, and the animal 
manures that accompany them. Lands, badly fed, cannot 
stand constant cropping, even with plants the most 
suitable ; the soil must have rest, and since animal and 
putrescent manures cannot be obtained, it remains to 
produce vegetable matter in the soil itself. The four 
years' course exhausts thin soils ; manure is applied 
once during the rotation, and scantily from want 
of material. He therefore recommends that seeds 
invariably be sown after wheat, and mown or pastured 
for two or three years. He gives a mixture of 
4 bushel Perennial Rye Grass. 
i Cocksfoot. 
i6lb Dogstail. 
4 Catstail. 
4 Meadow Fescue. 
6 Red Clover. 
4 White Uover. 
