Читать книгу Round the Year with Enid Blyton—Autumn Book - Enid blyton - Страница 3

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To-day I am going to tell you about our cornfields and the different grains we grow there. Even town children know corn when they see it, for little sheaves of it are always brought to decorate our churches at harvest-festival time. Country children know it well, because their fathers have to do with its sowing and reaping.

Why is corn so important to us? It is because we get from it the flour to make our bread and our porridge; it is our chief food. We ought to know something about it, and we ought to be able to tell the different corns from one another.

Our cornfields are very lovely when the corn is ripe. It is a rich gold colour and waves beautifully in the wind, making a whispery, rustling noise. Red poppies peep here and there, corn cockles shake out their pink petals, and the scarlet pimpernels glow as if they were on fire, set close to the dry ground. These flowers are weeds—it is the golden corn that is the farmer’s joy.

Look at it. What does it remind you of? It is very like a giant grass, isn’t it? It has long narrow leaves like grass, a jointed stem, and the spike of corn at the top reminds us of flowering grasses. Corn is simply a cultivated grass. Just as we have little wild strawberries and big garden strawberries, small wild poppies and big cultivated ones, so we have wild grasses in the hedges and big cultivated grass in our fields—the wheat, barley and oats we see growing in the country.

Our fields of corn are small compared with those in America or Canada. There you may see corn stretching right away to the skyline, waving in the hot sun—miles on miles of corn, so much that you might say, “But who will eat all that!”

We cannot grow enough corn in our own country to feed our people, so other parts of the world grow it for us. Is there a map in your atlas showing the corn-lands of the world? Look and see. If there is, you will be astonished to find what a great deal of the earth is used for growing corn.

How many different corns do you know the names of? Wheat is one. Barley is another, and oats. Then there is rye, too, but it is not grown in our country so much as the others. There is yet another corn called maize, or Indian corn. In Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” poem you will find a fine story telling how the gift of maize came to the Red Indians. You will like to read it.

We call all our corns cereals. The name cereals comes from Ceres, who was the goddess of farmers and who loved to look after the crops and fruits of mankind. Do you eat cereals for your breakfast? If you have grape-nuts, shredded wheat, post-toasties or any of those kinds of foods, you have cereals. They are all made from corn.

A CLEVER MACHINE THAT CUTS DOWN THE CORN AND BINDS IT INTO SHEAVES FOR THE FARMER

The corn you perhaps know the best of all is the wheat. Have you an ear of wheat there? An ear is simply a stalk of corn with all its grains. Look at your ear of wheat. Do you see the yellow grains packed closely together on the stalk, each with a spiky tip? They are the seeds of the corn. Pull some off and look at them. If you had seen this ear in June, when it was green and unripe, you would have seen big stamens hanging out, with large anthers (the tops of the stamens, where the pollen is kept) swinging in the wind, and you would have seen feathery stigmas, too, all ready to catch the powdery pollen.

Wheat does not only give us the flour for our bread. It gives us the macaroni we sometimes have in our milk puddings. Do you have puddings of semolina at home? That is made from wheat, too, and so is the vermicelli you may have tasted in puddings as well. Shredded wheat comes from wheat, of course, and so do puffed wheat and the funny brown grape-nuts some of us like so much for breakfast. What a lot of different dishes we make from our ears of wheat!

Here is a very bristly, bearded ear of corn. It is barley. You may have picked wild barley grass in the meadows and have played a sly joke on your companion by pushing the bristly head up his sleeve. When he tried to get it down, the bristles stuck tight into his sleeve, and unless he managed to turn it right round he could not pull it out, but had to leave it there, bristling uncomfortably!

The grains are very neatly and tidily packed together and the bristles are long. We can easily tell barley from wheat because of its long beard. What is barley used for? You are sure to have seen the packets of barley that mother takes down from the shelf when she wants to put barley into the soup or into a stew. They are hard little grains, but when we see them in the soup they have swelled up and are big and soft.

Left to right: WHEAT, BARLEY, RYE, OATS and MAIZE (a head of maize is really much bigger than the other corns shown)

In some places the barley is made into bread. Most of the barley, however, goes to the breweries and is made into malt, which is used for brewing beer. A good deal of it goes also to the distilleries and helps to make whisky.

Have you any rye to look at? We do not grow it very much in our country. It grows well in colder countries and does not mind poor soil. It is very like barley, isn’t it? What is the difference? The bristles are not so long and the grains are not so neatly packed up the stalk. Bread is made from rye and we call it blackbread, because it is very dark in colour. Look for wild rye-grass in the meadows. There is sure to be plenty there.

Do you know the pretty, feathery oats? Scottish children will know oats very well indeed, for it likes the colder climate of Scotland. Do you have porridge for breakfast in the winter? If you do, you are eating oats, for porridge is made from oats.

Oats are made into bread, too, and into biscuits and cakes. Have you had oatmeal biscuits? There is a very useful animal who likes oats as much as we do—and that is the horse! Look at him putting his nose into his bag of oats—how he enjoys it!

Perhaps some of you grew grains of maize when you tried germination experiments in the spring-time. Do you remember the queer-shaped little golden grains? If we keep hens or pigeons we know what maize is like, too, for we give it to the birds to eat. Sometimes we have it in a pudding, for cornflour comes from maize. Has anyone seen it growing?

It is grown a great deal in America, and there it is the chief cereal. It does not look very much like corn when it grows. It shoots up very tall, taller than a man, and has stems rather like bamboo, with large, broad leaves hanging down from the joints. At the top is a thick spike, and inside it are hundreds of maize grains, packed as tightly as can be, ripe and yellow. Ask your greengrocer to show you a head of maize if he has one.

The corn does not have flowers such as the buttercups, poppies or dandelions have. When it is in flower in June or July we see no brightly coloured petals glowing in the sun. There are no petals to see—only stamens and stigmas, shaking loosely in the wind. It is the wind that takes the pollen from the stamens and blows it on to the waiting stigmas; so there is no need for the corn to waste time and energy on pretty petals or sweet scents, for the wind has neither eyes nor nose. Those flowers that need the help of bees, beetles, flies or moths provide colour and scent, for these insects are attracted by brightness and sweetness. The corn merely hangs out its stamens for the wind to shake when it goes by, and hopes that some of the pollen will fly to the feathery stigmas; and, of course, it does, so that the ears of corn ripen into good grain and give us the food we need.

Men reap the corn and it is taken to the mills to be ground. The husks are separated from the grain and are used as bran, which cattle like to eat. The stalks of the corn become dry straw, and we use it for many things—thatch for cottages, bedding for cattle and for dogs in kennels, and we also put it under our strawberries to keep them from being spoilt by mud, when it rains. Can you think of some other uses?

Go out into the meadows and look at the wild grasses. How many different kinds can you bring back with you? Do we use these grasses as we do wheat, barley and oats? No—but the farmer finds them very useful in another way. He grows them as grass for his cattle, and as hay for the winter-time. Have you seen hay-meadows! Aren’t they lovely, scattered with golden buttercups and white moon-daisies with the red sorrel sticking up here and there? The hay is cut, dried and built into stacks, and the cattle are glad of it when the long winter is here and there is little fresh grass to eat.

See if you can find wild barley, rye-grass and wild oats. Bring back as many other grasses as you can, and try to find out their names. Look for the loose stamens and shake out the pollen. You will be surprised to find what a lot of different grasses grow under your nose, never noticed by you before!

THINGS TO DO

1.

Go to see a cornfield if you can. Listen to it whispering.

2.

Draw an ear of corn. Pull out a single grain and draw that.

3.

Read the story of Mondamin in the Song of Hiawatha.

4.

Write down three sorts of corn you know, and say what they give us to eat.

5.

Draw three wild grasses. Find out their names and write them underneath.