The Natural History of Selborne

Men wash their sheep.  Mr. John Muslo left us.

A man brought me a large plate of straw-berries, which were crude, & not near ripe.  The ground all as hard as iron: we can sow nothing nor plant out.

The young Bantam hen brought out only three chickens.  Showers that wetted the blades of corn, & grass, but did not descend to the root.  Ground very hard.

Watered well the white poplar at the foot of the bostal. Cut the slope hedge in the Bakers hill.  Mrs. Clement, & children came.

Sowed two rows of large white kidney-beans: but the ground is so hard, that it required much labour to make it fit to receive the seed.  The old Bantam brought out only three chickens.

The ground sadly burnt up.  Royal russets show much bloom.  Summer cabbage comes in.

My weeding-woman swept up on the grass-plot a bushel-basket of blossoms from the white apple-tree: & yet that tree seems still covered with bloom.

This dry fit has proved of vast advantage to the kingdom; & by drying & draining the fallows, will occasion the growing of wheat on many hundred of acres of wet, & flooded land, that were deemed to be in a desperate state, & incapable of being seeded this season.

Men sow wheat: but the land-springs break out in some of the Hartley malm-fields.

Dr Chandler mows the church-litton closes for hay.  Farmer Parsons houses pease, which have been hacked for weeks.  Barley abroad.