You invite persons who have grown good crops of grain or turnips
to forward you the particulars. I therefore enclose you an account
of an attempt which I made to grow wheat on the same land year
after year, that account reaching to the fourth white crop in
1844. As I still continue the experiment, I shall be in a position
to continue the account up to the present time (as I am now
threshing out the last year's crop), and will send it to you if
you think it worthy of insertion in the "Agricultural Gazette."
If the account I now send is not worth inserting, please to send
it to your correspondent A. W., who doubted whether there were
authenticated instances of land producing eighty, seventy, or even
fifty bushels to the acre.
I attribute my success in growing wheat to the use of silicate of
soda, and yet, singularly enough, until now I have been unable to
induce anyone else to try it. This season, however, several
persons have applied to me to procure it for them. Among them is
the talented editor of the "Liverpool Times," whose farm at Barton
Moss shows what good management will accomplish on very
unpromising soils. If, as I hope will be the case, the silicate of
soda should supply to peat its greatest deficiency, no one will
more readily discover it than Mr. Baines.
In the use of silicates of soda and potash, one precaution is very
necessary, namely, that you really have a soluble silicate, not a
mere mechanical mixture of ground flint and alkali. This is a very
different thing, and one which, if it be not carefully guarded
against, will lead to nothing but disappointment.
Again, the silicate of soda may be properly made, in the first
instance, but in a long exposure to the atmosphere, the soda
attracts carbonic acid, and is liberated from the silex, and this
has disappointed my expectation more than once.
Again, though I consider it desirable to defer the application of
soluble silicates until vegetation has made a fair start in the
spring, yet in one instance I delayed the application of it so
long that there was not moisture to dissolve it until the end of
June, and then the plant began to send up suckers from the roots,
and the crop was seriously injured by it; but this was in an
exceedingly dry spring, and may not happen again for many years.
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CLITHEROE, _March 7th_, 1848.
In continuing my attempts to grow wheat on the same land year
after year, I observed that the crop of 1845 was very seriously
injured by the deficient drainage--the old drains having been
destroyed by the subsoil plough. It was therefore necessary to
replace them; they were accordingly put in four feet deep. This
took up so much time, that the season for sowing wheat had gone
by, and the ground was cropped with potatoes, which were dug up in
September, and the wheat might have been got in early in October;
but seeing in your paper that sowing too early was not advisable,
and also being carried away by the arguments of the thin-seeders,
I deferred sowing until the middle of November, and also put in
little seed, and the weather proving very unfavourable when the
wheat was coming up, there was not half plant enough in the
spring, and I hesitated whether to plough up the ground or to
drill in barley. I determined to do the latter. It was put in on
the 18th April, and wheat and barley grew up together, and when
cut and threshed, it yielded 48 bushels to the acre.
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