Frame for the new crossing bench came

The frame for the new crossing bench came in from the joiner on the eleventh of April, and I spent the afternoon fitting the slats - twenty-two of them, each two inches wide, set at a gap of one inch so the rain would not pool and the bees would have room to work between the rows. What surprised me was not the wood but the light. The old bench sat under the north wall and received perhaps four hours of direct sun in June; this one, set three paces east, took the morning full on the slats by seven o’clock. I had not measured the difference. I had only moved it to be nearer the water butt, and the light came as a fact I had not asked for.

The twenty-two slats hold forty-four plants at the spacing I use for the F2 rows. That is not a population. At forty-four I can see the smooth seeds and the wrinkled, and I can count them, but the ratio will not be stable - last season’s F2 block of two hundred and fifty-three gave 187 smooth to 66 wrinkled, near enough to three to one that I would stake the autumn on it, while the smaller bed of thirty-eight gave 26 to 12, which is not the same ratio at all but only noise wearing its coat. Count past two hundred before you believe a ratio. The bench is a beginning, not a result.

What I will do next is sow the forty-four with the seed from the 1858 wrinkled line and keep the light where it now falls, so that the east bench and the north bench differ in one condition only.

Herr Tschermak - the slats are spaced for rain, not for light, and I have moved the whole experiment three paces into the morning without meaning to. Watch whether the east rows flower before the north rows, and note the date.