Page:Australia, from Port Macquarie to Moreton Bay.djvu/196

 maize to the acre, and fifty bushels of wheat to the acre, produced by the same ground in the same year, the maize having been planted immediately the wheat was off the ground. In the fertile southern parts of the territory of New South Wales, wheat, equal in quality to that of Van Diemen's Land, yields crops of forty bushels to the acre. I shall not be therefore going too high, in assuming twenty-one bushels per acre, as the average crop of wheat on good ground.

Maize is a never-failing crop in the districts I have supposed the farm to be selected in. One hundred bushels to the acre, appears to be about the maximum crop; this has often been harvested at the Wilson river, near Port Macquarie. At our station on the MacLeay river, we never had more than seventy-five bushels to the acre, and our ordinary crop was fifty bushels; pumpkins being grown between the rows, which of course diminished the crop of maize. Dr. Lang considers eighty bushels to the acre a good crop. I shall therefore assume fifty bushels to the acre as an average crop of maize. As to the less important crop of swede turnips, cabbages, &c. they grow with greater rapidity, certainty and abundance, than on the best English soils, when planted on the alluvial flooded lands of New South Wales.