Hop Cultivation. 
249 
placed. A fan within this, moved rapidly by cog-wheels con- 
nected with the travelling wheels, drives the sulphur through a 
blast-pipe, from which it is distributed in a dense wide-spreading 
cloud. An arrangement to regulate the supply can be adjusted 
while the sulphurator is moving. About five acres per day can 
be sulphured with this machine, which costs about 12 1. 
Sulphate of copper has been tried for hop mildew, but only 
to a very small extent. It would seem that a happy combina- 
tion of sulphate of copper with the soft soap and quassia solution 
used for aphis blight ought to have the result of stopping both 
mildew and blight. Experiments in this direction will be made 
in the ensuing season. 
“ Lewing.” 1 
Wind has a baneful effect upon hop plants when the burr is 
forming, and afterwards in all stages of the growth of the cones. 
It hinders their full development, and when they are getting 
ripe the heavy gales which invariably come towards the end of 
August make them brown by bruising them. Many kinds of 
screens, or “ lews,” are adopted to lessen the force of the wind ; 
some natural, as quick hedges, in parts of Kent, which grow as 
high as twenty to twenty-five feet in some districts, and rows of 
Lombardy and other kinds of poplar. Others are made of high 
poles set closely together, or of hop plants put as near to each 
other as possible, and trained up poles pitched close together 
round the outsides of hop grounds. Light cloth of a coarse 
mesh, made of cocoanut fibre, is stretched about twelve feet wide 
at about eight feet from the ground 2 upon wires fixed to perma- 
nent poles, in those parts of the hop ground exposed to the pre- 
vailing wind. Where considerable lengths of this are put up, 
strong posts are required at intervals between the poles, or the 
whole screen will go down with a mighty smash. “ Lewing,” or 
screening, in this way, is expensive, but it is now adopted by 
most of the large planters. 
Picking. 
Hops are not, as many suppose, distinct flowers, but 
strobiles, or collections of imbricated scales, or bracts, under 
which are yellowish, aromatic, lupulinic glands. These strobiles 
are like the cones of firs, being in reality the fruit of the hop- 
plant rather than its flower, which is inconspicuous and 
1 In Pcgge’s Alphabet of Kentielsms, “ lew ” is given as meaning sheltered. 
The word is used in Kent as a verb, noun, and adjective. 
2 This is generally made in widths of six feet, and costs about a shilling 
per running yard. 
VOL. IV. T. S. — 14 
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