THE NATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA For The Home, school and Library - (year) 1925 Vol. IV - Chicago National Encyclopedia Company 1925 HEMP Hemp, an annual herb, with a tough, fibrous bark, belonging to the nettle family. Native to central Asia. As cultivated, or growing in waste places, hemp is from four to fourteen feet high. The pollen-bearing flowers and the seed-bearing flowers are on separate plants. The dark green leaves are composed of from five to nine lanceolate, serrate, pointed leaflets, two to five inches long and about one-sixth as wide. Hemp is cultivated for seed and fiber. Seed hemp is raised in hills like corn, and produces immense plants with stalks like a sunflower and a wide head of branches. The seed commands a good price as bird seed and for sowing. The chief crop is sowed broadcast, for fiber. Hemp for seed is sowed in drills. The strong, limestone land of Kentucky raises about 10,000,000 pounds of hemp fiber a year, which is not far from two thirds of the entire American crop. A typical plant in a dense hemp field is ten or twelve feet high. The black land of Russia produces hemp twenty feet high. The stem is from a fourth to three-eighths of an inch in diameter. The inner bark is the hemp of commerce. The Kentucky farmer finds it advisable to follow to follow a five year rotation of hemp, corn, wheat, two crops of clover which is sowed with the wheat, then hemp again. Plowing and sowing are practically the same as for oats or spring wheat. One to three bushels of seed are required per acre. The young hemp plants are expected to overshadow and keep down weeds. Hemp is cut when the pollen is falling (July in California, September in Kentucky), either by hand, with a heavy sickle, or with a strong self-rake reaper or even a mower. It is left on the stubble to dry. It should be turned over frequently. When dry it is placed in shocks or in a carefully built rack. The next operation is retting, a word related, no doubt, to rotting. In France and Italy, it is placed in tanks of water; bet in Kentucky the hemp is spread out in long rows on blue grass sward to ret or decay in the dew. Bacteria get at work and decompose the gum that forms a part of the bark, and loosen it also from the [ ] stem, so that the fibers of hemp hang [ ] practically the whole length of the plant. The next process is breaking or pounding the plants, armful by armful, until the woody part of the stem drops out, leaving the rough hemp ready for market. Machines are in use for this work, but they have not yet been perfected sufficiently to take the place of hand labor. A man breaks from 100 to 250 pounds a day. The rough fiber is put up in bales of 150 pounds each and sold to local buyers (in Kentucky) at from $60 to $100 per ton. Portable breaking machines will soon be able, it is thought, to do the work, and thus reduce the cost of raising hemp. Local dealers hackle the hemp, that is, draw it across clusters of upright sharp spikes that comb cut the remnants of the inside stem and straighten the fiber. The fine, clean fiber is doubled up and knotted or tied into small bundles of three or four pounds. It is then the hemp of commerce. The rougher fiber, which is hackled out, is called tow. It has a soiled whitish color, whence the name tow-headed as applied to a child. China and Japan, France, Russia, and Hungary raise large quantities of hemp. The processes are essentially the same in all countries, and have not changed materially for a thousand years; but experiments are on foot to break with machinery, and to loosen the fiber in a chemical bath, thus cutting out the slow and uncertain process of renting by dew. Hemp is an excellent material for cordage. To day that one will stretch hemp is a slang phrase implying that he will be hanged. Hemp rope have great strength, and were long preferred to all others on shipboard. During the early days of the American navy, Lexington, Kentucky, was headquarters for naval rigging; but, with the invention of wire ropes, the hemp industry fell off. Now that wireless telegraphy requires a mast head free from the presence of iron, the demand for hemp ropes seems likely to revive. At present the Kentucky product is used chiefly in the manufacture of twines, and of chain for the back of Axminster, Brussels, and Moquette carpets.
Posted on: Mon, 08 Sep 2014 19:44:40 +0000
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