English opium. : The premium of thirty guineas was this Session presented to Messrs. Cowley and Staines, surgeons, of Winslow, Bucks, for cultivating four acres of the white poppy ...

  • Cowley, John
Date:
1823
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: English opium. : The premium of thirty guineas was this Session presented to Messrs. Cowley and Staines, surgeons, of Winslow, Bucks, for cultivating four acres of the white poppy ... Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    reduced, by evaporation, to 15/6., 602., 6drs. (avoir¬ dupois) of solid opium, a specimen of which accompanies this communication. The crop was pretty perfect, but the people were hindered by frequent showers. The table, No. 1, will explain their daily progress and expense. We will now endeavour to describe minutely, the cultivation and process employed last year. I11 the beginning of February, 1821, a field measuring 4 acres, 1 rood, 35 perches, exclusive of fences, dec., which had borne two successive crops of poppies, and had re¬ ceived a ploughing immediately after the removal of the last, in the preceding Autumn, was ploughed a second time, and sown with seed of the papaier somniferum, between the 10th and 15th; the seed was the growth of the pre- ' ceding year, and was drilled with 21 inch intervals. It came up by March 14th, and held out the promise of a full crop until the beginning of April, when some remark¬ ably heavy showers of rain occurred, which made the crop extremely imperfect, intervals of from one, to twenty yards appearing all over the field. One acre was patched with potatoes, and the remainder with Swedish turnips; the former did very well, but the latter were destroyed by the fly, excepting a small residue, which w*as drawn in July, and transplanted, to fill up a crop of Swedes a mile distant; which, though more fortunate than these patches, had yet suffered severely from the same cause. The intervals between the drills were hoed by the first week in May. This operation wras found to require much care, in consequence of the immense number of annuals with which the land wras infested. The difficulty was much diminished when the distinctive characters of the papaver somniferum, became familiar to the new labourers. These were soon able to distinguish the poppies from all
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