of rape might be grown, from which “salted cabbage” would be prepared for winter use.
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Fig. 146.—Family engaged in cutting, from bundles of wheat, the roots to be used in making compost, Chihli, China.
Multiple crops are grown as far north in Chihli as
Tientsin and Peking, these being oftenest wheat, maize,
large and small millet and soy beans, and this, too, where
the soil is less fertile and where the annual rainfall is
only about twenty-five inches, the rainy season beginning
in late June or early July, and Fig. 145 shows one of
these fields as it appeared June 14th, where two rows of
wheat and two of large millet were planted in alternating
pairs, the rows being about twenty-eight inches apart.
The wheat was ready to harvest but the straw was unusually
short because growing on a light sandy loam in a
season of exceptional drought, but little more than two
inches of rain having fallen after January 1st of that
year.
The piles of pulverized dry-earth compost seen between the rows had been brought for use on the ground occupied
