WAIWERA.

Otago Witness, Issue 2239, 28 January 1897, Page 29

WAIWERA.

January 23 — T purpose this week devoting the principal part of my letter to a few extracts from letters received from Green dale, Canterbury, more particularly concaraing the present state of the grass seed tnd corn crops. Of course we have ■ already heard a good deat of the destruction by ! fires in many plitces, and even in this district j there has b;en a great deal of grass and crop de- j stroyed by fires supposed to be caused by engines. ' In one place, however, had it not been discovered in time, without doubt the public school and > adjacent buildings would have been burnt, the fiie beiDg caused by the sun's rays shining on a : piece of glass. What might have been a very large fire was fortunately seen in time and promptly put out. As the gor3« fences are in many places dying out, the dread of fire is very great when the country is so dry. Referring to the crops, my correspondent tells me that th« hay and grans seed crops have .been good average ones, the seed being a remarkably good sample, and nodonbtit will in many instances be sold for the be»t Poverty Bay, and probably b« quite us good too. iJince the need "" harvest -the other crops have had a hard and dry tima of it, consequently paddocks of oats that in ordinary seasons would ( yield from 30 to 50 bushels are now being stripped, bnog too short to .cut, and in m^ny places stock ! have been turned in to feed them off. Wheat j generally is a ffcir crop. On account of the drought lately fead was very scarce, and had not the rain come at l-«sb it would hava been a very nerious matter indeed for stock The land being so very hard in many cases, it bas heen quite impossible to plough it for turnips, so that in any case; now the crops will be very late, and a much smaller area than usual has been put in. A valuable winter feed, however, is pretty generally grown by sowing dun oats in the fall, a plan which ■ answers remarkahly well. By the way, this is often t.be way the rotation of their crops ia undertaken — beginning with a crop of dun oats in the ks, followed by a crop of turnips, Ac, then wheat or oats, as the case may be, sown down with mixed grasses. A good deal of clover seed is also saved in the Greendale district, besides a large quanity of clover hay being made. From the general tone of the letter I gather that oats will be very scarce in the district this season — Hdeed, from what I can gather oats will probably be scarcer than mus>l throughout the greater part of Canterbury. And now that it is pretty safe to predict that on the whole crops will not be heavy even in Otago, it is to be hoped our cheques may be made up by far better prices ruling than we have been receiving for many seasons past. A relative of mine in the Greendale district, who once lived at Waiyvera, says he finds the mode of cultivation very different to ours of : Waiwera in many ways. With still a very warm ! side it>r Otago arid its people, he prefers Greendale with its occasionpl drawbacks for farming, t the climate being better on the whole for both man and stock. Weather.— We are again getting some good thowere, which are rusbiug on the turaips . quickly. As soon as it is dry enough the grass i seed threshing will be gone on with with all pcs- j sible speed.