m; wherever you see these growing you may
be sure that lime is absent.

Lime really differs from chalk, but changes into it so quickly in the
soil that the action of both is almost, though not quite, the same.

[Illustration: Fig. 46. A wheat field in May. The large patch in the
centre where the crop is doing badly lay under water for much of the
winter because of the bad drainage]

SUMMARY. The various things we have learnt in this Chapter are:--

Autumn and winter cultivation are needed to loosen the soil so that
rain can soak in and not lie about in pools, and also to facilitate
working in spring.

The soil has to be broken down very finely and made rather dry for a
seed bed. The seed has to be rolled in and then left entirely alone.

As soon as the little plants are up the soil must be hoed, and the more
often this is done the better. Hoeing keeps the soil cool and moist in
hot weather, the loose layer acting like a mulch of straw. Anything
else that shields the soil from the sun or the wind has the same action
but is not so effective as the mulch. Further, hoeing keeps down
weeds, which successfully compete against almost any cultivated plants.
Humus also prevents the loss of moisture from soils.

Drainage may be necessary to remove excess of water.

Liming or chalking the soil is beneficial, not only because of the
improvements mentioned in Chap. III., but also because certain
injurious substances are thereby removed. There are, however, some
plants that will not tolerate lime.

[1] At great depths below the surface the temperature rises again from
quite another cause.

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CHAPTER X

THE SOIL AND THE COUNTRYSIDE

In this chapter we want to put together much of what we have learned
about the different kinds of soil, so that as we go about the country
we may know what to look for on a clay soil, a sandy soil, and so on.

We have seen that clay holds water and is very wet and sticky in
winter, while in summer it becomes hard and dry, and is liable to crack
badly. "It greets a' winter and girns a' summer," as one of Dr John
Brown's characters said of his soil. Clay soils are therefore hard to
dig and expensive to cultivate: the farmer calls them heavy and usually
prefers to put them into grass because once the grass is up it lasts as
long as it is wanted and never needs to be resown. But in the days
when we grew our own wheat, before we imported it from the United
States and