“Now industrious agriculthure transplants the “Flower of Forth,”
To a cosy situation all shelthered from the North!”
M. G. R.
ON THE FOLLY OF SOWING BAD SEEDS BECAUSE THEY ARE CHEAP.
BY MARTIN DOYLE.
A few months ago I saw in the shop window of a petty seedsman near Dublin, an advertisement announcing the sale of grass seeds at two shillings and eightpence per barrel of four bushels. I had the curiosity to examine those seeds, which, as may be supposed from their price, were a compound of the germs of weeds, with a small proportion of grass seeds intermixed. I have no doubt that some poor and uncalculating petty farmers were silly enough to purchase this trash on the penny-wise and pound-foolish principle, and I well know that there is no point on which greater ignorance prevails than on that of a proper selection of grass seeds, although they should be sown with an accurate regard to the nature of the soil, the number of years during which the land is to be left in meadow or in pasturage, each of which conditions also requires a different description of seeds.
The successful establishment of grass seeds depends materially, besides the clean and pulverised state of the land, on their adaptation to the soil; and if that be in a state perfectly fit for their reception, a much smaller quantity of seed will be sufficient than under the opposite circumstances; and if the land be in a foul state previously to laying it down, it is clear that the sowing of weed seeds, with a trifling and uncertain admixture of true grass seeds, cannot render it cleaner.
In practical result, the farmer who leaves his field to the generosity of nature is more judicious, because in our humid climate the soil possesses a tendency to generate the indigenous grasses, of which some are really good, and which, from their overpowering qualities, soon dispossess those that may have been sown, and form a close and excellent turf. But to sow weeds is inexpressibly absurd, and this the man does who buys such a compound as that to which I have referred, or who sows them because he happens to have them by some means, and is unwilling to have them lost. Perhaps they have been collected from his own little rick of hay, which he knows to have been of the worst quality, or some stable boy has given him, or stolen for him, the dirty and perhaps fermented sweepings of a nasty hay loft, in which bad hay had been stored, and he is unwilling to throw away what he has so unluckily obtained: his parkeen soon bears testimony to his imprudence: and he admits, though reluctantly, that the grass seeds which he had sown were not of the best quality, though they were procured from a hay loft, when he perceives that they have only introduced an artificial increase of bad herbage, which his little stock of animals would unanimously reject, if hunger did not forbid such fastidiousness.
But the deluded purchaser very frequently forgets that though he has a great bulk for his money, he has a bad bargain; he does not consider that the respectable seedsman, though he charges much more for his seeds, gives a far better quality in general, and does not sell dirt and unprolific grass seeds in the compound which he supplies. Petty seedsmen, no doubt, do so frequently; and how can it be otherwise, when their stock is a motley contribution from farmers’ wives, hostlers, and labourers, who collect every variety of good and bad seeds from every description of meadow and soil? It is better to pay a great deal more for the best seed, of which a far lesser proportion will suffice. I can conceive but one case in which a rational farmer could deliberately use such defective seed as that which I saw in the little huckster’s shop, namely, when he is about to surrender his farm (being obligated to lay down his land with grass), and has all that unamiable and inexcusable feeling which so generally prompts men in such circumstances to act in defiance of their great Christian principle of doing unto others as we would have them do unto us.
In this case, a selfish ill-natured tenant wishes to annoy his landlord, and his own innocent successor, to the utmost of his power; and, therefore, while adhering to the letter of his agreement—to sow grass seeds—he breaks it in the spirit, and very effectually, in fact, too, by substituting weeds under the denomination of grasses.