232 QUEENSLAND AGRICULTURAL JouENAL [1 Aprin, 1902. 
crop. It is easily recognised. By the way, never buy seed wheat from a 
smutted crop, nor even from a district where smut is prevalent. Smut is a 
fungoid disease. It attacks wheat, oats, barley, rye, and many grasses. If you 
examine wheat in some fields when it is in ear, you will see the ears covered 
with a dark powder. On looking closer, you will observe that the floral organs 
and their coverings are destroyed, and in their place is a mass of dark, chocolate- 
coloured powder. This powder is a mass of small spores. What is a spore? 
A spore is a very minute particle which takes the place of the seed 
in flowerless plants. If you look at the back of a fern-leaf you will see spore 
cases full of spores, which by and by fall to the ground, and in damp weather 
reproduce themselves by millions. Such are the spores of smut. Now, before 
harvest time, these blow away and many settle on the healthy ears and remain 
there till seed time, when the disease again appears. Bunr is another fungoid 
disease which attacks wheat. It differs somewhat from smut, for which it is 
often mistaken. The effects are not seen till harvest time, and then, if you 
open up an apparently healthy ear of wheat, you find that it contains nothing 
but a greasy, evil-smelling mass of black spores. Jf you mix bunted grain 
with healthy grain, the effect is that the whole is blackened and only saleable 
at a very low price. 
Now the spores of smut or bunt remain on the wheat after it is threshed, 
and, unless you take precautions, they will be sown with it, and your crop will 
certainly be smutted or bunted. There are at least two methods adopted 
whereby the smut spore is killed. 
One way is to pickle the seed it is intended to sow in a solution of 
sulphate of copper. Mix a solution at the rate of 1 lb. of sulphate of copper 
in 1 gallon of water. This will steep 4 bushels of wheat. You may either 
put the wheat in a gunny bag and dip the bag into the solution, and then 
allow it to drain, or you may spread the grain out on a smooth floor and pour 
the solution over it, turning it over once or twice with a shovel, but this is @ 
wasteful way. Some farmers pickle their seed wheat a month or six weeks 
before sowing, so as to let the “bluestone” (as sulphate of copper is called) 
become thoroughly dry, and to give it time to kill the spores of smut before 
the wheat is sown. The copper forms a film on the seed, and effectually 
destroys the spores which may be clinging to it without injuring the wheat. 
Another method is by 1oT-WaTER TREATMENT. Take two washtubs and a 
basket, or, as before, a gunny-bag. Jill the latter three parts full of wheat; 
then half fill one of the tubs with cold water, and boil an equal quantity, | 
which you then add to the cold water. This will bring the temperature of the | 
water to about from 130 to 1325 degrees Fahrenheit, which latter isthe proper | 
temperature. Into this plunge the basket of seed and keep it there for a— : 
quarter of an hour, lifting and lowering it several times meanwhile. You will 
do well to have a thermometer to test the heat of the water, as you must not ; 
allow it to go lower than 180 degrees nor higher than 135 degrees Fahrenheit. 
If it gets below 180 degrees, add boiling water. At the end of 15 minutes 
remove the basket, let it drain, spread the seed out on the barn floor, and either 
sow it at once or allow it to thoroughly dry if you are not quite ready for it. 
In sowing broadcast, 1 bushel to the acre is more than sufficient. If you 
use a seed drill, 20 1b. of seed is ample. Most farmers sow too much seed. Take 
the instance of 1 bushel to the acre. Fair average seed will average 800 grains — 
and good plump seed 700 grains to the oz., so that a bushel of 60 1b. contains 
750,000 grains. In a square acre there are 4,840 yards, or 43,560 square 
feet. So you see that a bushel to the acre means from fifteen to eighteen seeds 
to the square foot. Let us say that one-quarter of this fails to germinate, 
being partly eaten by birds, partly insufficiently covered ; still we have from 
twelve to fourteen plants per square foot—that is, just twice as many as there | 
should be. A seed drill is generally constructed to sow from 35 lb. to 40 Ib. — 
per acre, and, since the seed is all properly covered, there will be nearly as 
many plants per acre as with a bushel sown broadcast. 
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