The wheat yield was poor and chinch bugs attacked the corn in such myriads that our Farmer found "hundreds of them & their young under the blades and at the lower joints of the Stock." By the middle of August "Nature had put on a melancholy look." The corn was "_fired_ in most places to the Ear, with little appearance of yielding if Rain should now come & a certainty of making nothing if it did not." Like millions of anxious farmers before and after him, he watched eagerly for the rain that came not.

He records in his diary that on August 17th a good deal of rain fell far up the river, but as for his fields--it tantalizingly passed by on the other side, and "not enough fell here to wet a handkerchief." On the eighteenth, nineteenth and twenty-second clouds and thunder and lightning again awakened hopes but only slight sprinkles resulted.

On the twenty-seventh nature at last relented and, to his great satisfaction, there was a generous downpour.
The rain was beneficial to about a thousand grains of Cape of Good Hope wheat that Washington had just sown and by the thirty-first he was able to note that it was coming up.

For several years thereafter he experimented with this wheat.

He found that it grew up very rank and tried cutting some of it back.