MANAGEMENT OF MEADOWS AND PASTURES. • 93 



resisting drought and heat and making a fine desirable sod; 

 but you must not forget that there is no soil which is incapable of 

 bearing grass if we only select the variety best adapted to it, and 

 bestow upon it the treatment most suitable to it By effecting 

 physical and chemical alterations in the soil, we may adapt it to 

 the production of almost any kind of grass, but as this is an 

 expensive and tedious process, most farmers will prefer, at least 

 in the first instance, to suit their grasses to their soils rather than 

 the soils to the grasses, but we should keep the amelioration of 

 the soil steadily in view so as at length to fit it for the production 

 of the most valuable kinds. 



Let us now endeavor to digest the facts which we have been 

 detailing into one view by deducing from them the principles 

 which ought to guide us in laying down artificial meadows, and 

 in doing so, I shall be very careful to teach no doctrine which has 

 not been confirmed by the observations of sound, practical farmers. 



1st — We must sow a variety of seeds. You may prepare your soil 

 as thoroughly as you will, make it as rich as manure can make it 

 and sow it so thickly with any one kind of grass seed that the 

 seeds actually touch each other and you will find that after germi- 

 nation many of the young plants will die leaving certain inter- 

 spaces of unoccupied soil between the plants which still live. If 

 you fill these interspaces ever so often with fresh seeds, they will 

 die out again and you will at length be fully convinced that it is 

 impossible to fill them up with plants of the same species, and 

 that the living plants will not tolerate any neighbors nearer than 

 a fixed and determinate distance, — this distance is determined by 

 the greater or lesser abundance of the specific food required by 

 the particular species of grass cultivated. If with a given amount 

 of this food, the plants will grow within three inches of each other, 

 with a less amount they will be six inches apart — with a still less 

 amount they will be nine inches asunder, and if the amount of food 

 is still farther reduced, the space will be twelve inches, and so on. 

 Each soil has therefore a capacity for bearing a certain maximum 

 number of plants upon a square foot, which can under no circum- 

 stances be exceeded. 



If now, you sow these unavoidable interspaces with the seeds 

 of another species of grass, a certain number of them will grow, 

 and as before a certain number of them will die after germination ; 

 the plants that grow will not interfere with those already growing, 

 and the crop will be materially increased. Still there will be 



