136 
Some Minor Farm Crops. 
adjudged point has been reached the bundles are carefully 
removed from the water, opened out, and either spread over 
grass land, or the bundles are several times divided and the 
smaller bundles so obtained are stood upon end to dry. When 
conducted with care, this method of getting rid of the gummy 
material gives a fibre of better quality than is possible by the 
method of dew-retting. The latter is a much slower process of 
achieving the same end, and necessitates spreading the stems 
thinly over the ground in regular rows where they are allowed 
to remain some six to ten weeks. During this period they are 
occasionally turned over so as to promote as far as possible a 
uniform decomposition. As might be expected from this 
treatment the fibre obtained is not of good quality ; nevertheless, 
of the small quantity of line grown and treated in this country 
nearly all of it is dew-retted by small farmers, who carry out 
all the operations and finally dispose of the clean fibre at a very 
reasonable profit to themselves. 
The straw after retting is dried and stored until opportunity 
offers of freeing it from the loosely adhering wood and preparing 
it for the market, which operations are usually carried out 
during the winter months. The method of cleaning the fibre 
which is still adopted in Somerset is hardly different from that 
practised in the Middle Ages, and consists in the first place 
in drying the retted straw on a horizontal frame erected at a 
safe distance above an open fire. This renders the woody part 
of the stems brittle so that by passing them between a pair of 
fluted rollers, called a breaker , the wood becomes broken into 
very small pieces, and may be removed to a large extent from 
the fibre by shaking. The final cleaning operation known as 
scutching is performed by taking the fibre in small handfuls at 
a time and holding it over an upright post and then beating, or 
striking, the long fibres in a downward direction with a hand 
blade made of thin wood. These handfuls of scutched fibre 
are then finished off at the ends by throwing over a hackling 
comb, and they are them loosely twisted and made up into 
bales for sale. 
Flax Growing for Linseed. 
The seed from English grown flax finds a ready market in 
this country and, for some purposes, is preferred to the imported 
seed. Although it has been contended that British grown seed 
is not so rich in fat as the imported linseed, yet the results of 
analysis show that this is not the case, as can be seen from the 
accompanying table. The quantity of fat present approximates 
closely to the amount present in the seed imported directly 
from such linseed-growing regions as Argentina, South Russia, 
and Algeria. 
