COUNTRY LIFE
IT is fatally easy to indulge in superlatives, but I cannot find a less extreme form of words to describe this year's harvest. In Norfolk I walked by a narrow path through a crop of wheat that seemed to me more solid in ear and more close than any I could remember: Three days later in Herefordshire I skirted a wide field of oats, very nearly ripe, which promises a quite fantastic yield. Then a fanner gave it as his considered verdict that the crop of the year was barley. If only this promise can be topped up by a few weeks of summer sun, a bumper harvest is certain throughout the country except in exposed fields where the storms have laid the long-strawed wheats. There is likelihood of a glut of potatoes. Frightened by last year's alarms (exaggerated by Government reports) everyone has grown as large an area as possible, and the yield is heavy. Cold rains have been more severe on birds than botany. The unfortunate partridges whose chicks were at the most vulnerable stage have suffered severely, only less severely than the terns, who have twice endured excessively high tides due to strong winds coinciding with the full moon.
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