Spring Wheat

Te Aroha News, Volume V, Issue 223, 8 October 1887, Page 3

Spring Wheat

In the cultivation of spring wheat, the average farmer is too apt to consider only the advantages resulting from a successful crop, and to forget the many essentials of soil, climate and method requisite to that success. Hard spring wheat, grown under the most favourable circumstances, is tho best wheat known to the world, at home or abroad, the bushel weighing more, containing more of the phosphates and nitrogen, under the form of gluten, while at the same time yielding more flour, which makesmore and better bread. That every intelligent and progressive grain grower should be ambitious to succeed with such a crop, is very natural, and that there should be many trials resulting in failures is more natural still, when we come to consider how rarely the conditions obtain necessary for success. On old ground where wheat follows wheat or another crop, the land should be broken as soon as possible after the last crop is taken off, in order for the vegetable matter to become decomposed and the soil to settle together and get compacted before seeding time. But it mu a t be borne in mind that, even in these cases, one of the essential conditions of a successful spring wheat crop is, there mu3t be good natural or artificial drainage, for in cool or wet summers moifct and even naturally wetlands produce better crops if well tile drained,

than high lands which*, h&ve only natural! drainage. The sowirtg should be dono^a* early as possible (not lq.fcer than September)) and rolling and harrowing thereafter, be mr dulged in if the crusty, state of the^soil demands it and the condition of the plants and/ the field will allow of <it, Then all,fv\vom> able conditions for a crop having been fulfilled as nearly as cawi be, the outcome will depend, if not on a moderate rainfall'and 1 a low mean temperature from seed* time bo harvest, at least o»- the absence of- heavy rains with continuad heat and muehithiuvJsw and lightning, about the tiino> thp-whtfat is ailing out in the-C*ar..