Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. OUR ROOT CROPS. The Turnip.—Mangel-Wunel.—Carrot.—Parsnip.—Kohl Rabi.—Potato. Root or fallow crops are of the utmost importance to the fertility of the farm—wielding a powerful influence on the succeeding crops throughout the entire rotation—as constituting the main provision of cattle food and thus of farmyard manure. Making no pretension to scientific accuracy in our classification, we throw together in this chapter those crops which in use and cultivation, and consequent place in the rotation, resemble the turnip or mangel-wurzel crop, without regard to the fact that they are not all strictly root crops. The tuber of the potato is an enlargement of an underground stem, and the bulb of the Kohl Eabi is an enlargement of the stem above the surface, but they are here classed together with the turnip, carrot, and parsnip. Of the 4,800,000 acres of so called green-crops in the United Kingdom, 2,340,000 are Swedish and common turnip, nearly 400,000 are mangel-wurzel, and 20,000 are carrot. Of Kohl Rabi there is no separate enumeration in the returns of the Board of Trade. Of potatoes there were 1,443,434 acres in the United Kingdom, in 1881. Of this immense area more than half—854,294 acres—weregrown in Ireland. And of the mangel-wurzel crop 339,385 acres were grown in England. The turnip in one or other of its many forms has been cultivated in England for at least 150 years. About 1730, Lord Townshend, a Norfolk landowner, observing its value and the success of its cultivation on the Continent, introduced the plant on his own estate in Norfolk, and did what he could to promote its cultivation. The turnip is taken generally after the wheat crop in the rotation. It affects a lighter class of soils than those generally known as wheat soils—but during the long...