The Natural History of Selborne

The air smells very sweet, & salubrious.  Men dig their hop-gardens, & sow spring-corn.  Cucumber plants show rudiments of fruit.  Planted cuttings of currans, & goose-berries.  Dug some of the quarters in the garden, & sowed onions, parsnips, radishes, & lettuces.  Planted more beans in the meadow.  Many flies are out basking in the sun.

Farmer Tull begins to reap wheat.  The hop-garden at Kimber’s fails again, & looks black.

Men dig in the hop-garden.

Two hop-waggons return with loads of woollen rags, to be spread & dug in as manure for the hop-gardens.

Men have taken advange of this dry season, & have chalked their hop-gardens, & fields.  The chalk at the foot of the hill is called marl, but it is only a hard grey chalk.  This chalk is of service on the malms.

Some hop-gardens injured by the wind of yesterday. Arichokes so dried-up that they do not head well.

Stormy wind, which broke-down great part of my Orleans plum-tree, & blew-down Molly White’s horse-chest-nut, & did vast damage to the hop-gardens, which are torn, & shattered in a sad manner!  This storm was very extensive, being very violent at the same time at Lyndon, in Rutland.  Much mischief was done at London, & at Portsmouth, & in Kent; at Brightelmstone also, & in Devonshire.

Farmer Town began to pick his hops: the hops are many, but small.  They were not smitten by the hail. Because they grew at S.E. end of the village.  Hopping begins at Hartley.  The two hop-gardens, belonging to Farmer Spencer & John Hale, that were so much injured, as it was supposed, by the hail-storm on June 5th shew now a prodigious crop, & larger & fairer hops than any in the parish.  The owners seem now to be convinced that the hail, by beating off the tops of the binds, has encreased the side-shoots, & improved the crop.  Query:  should not the tops of hops be pinched-off when the binds are very gross, & strong?  We find this practice to be of great service with melons, & cucumbers.  The scars, & wounds on the binds, made by the great hailstones are still very visible.