70 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Oct. 



northern slopes. It does mean that I advise the beginner to start 

 his first patch or two on his southern slopes. 



One of the great problems in America is the conservation of 

 the soil on our hillsides. Alfalfa once well seeded may be left on 

 a hillside for ten years ; then if plantain and grass come in, the 

 patch may be plowed up, cultivated for a half year and seeded to 

 alfalfa for another ten years. This makes alfalfa better than 

 orchards for holding the soil on the hillsides. 



Low, wet ground is apt to be sour. It will grow alsike 

 clover, timothy, cow peas, red top and corn, for these are more 

 tolerant of acid in the soil. Cow peas, alsike and red top seem to 

 thrive best where the soil is slightly acid. But alfalfa will not 

 grow on sour soil. It winter kills and the bacteria fail to thrive. 

 Some men have used tile drains and have converted low, coastal 

 plain or river bottom soils into the best of alfalfa soils. Alfalfa 

 being a gift of the desert demands a dry, well-drained soil. 



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Prepare a Good, Clean, Hard Seed Bed. 



When we have studied how to grow alfalfa as long and as 

 diligently as we have studied how to grow corn, we shall laugh 

 at the man who gets less than 5 or 6 tons to the acre, and some 

 of you will be getting much more. But when we have learned 

 how to grow alfalfa, we shall have learned that the seed is very 

 > small, and that for some weeks the little alfalfa plant is a very 

 delicate little thing. That means that it cannot hold its own 

 against many of the weeds. You can kill the weeds by disking 

 and plowing, by cultivating and hoeing before the alfalfa is 

 planted on the ground. But once the alfalfa is planted, you are 

 doomed to partial failure if you have sown the seed on ground 

 infested with v/eeds. You must sow alfalfa on a clean seed bed 

 in order to get a good permanent stand. 



The seed bed should be hard. I should hardly expect to 

 succeed with alfalfa if I plowed the ground just before sowing 

 the seed. I should much prefer disking to plowing before seeding. 

 Where alfalfa is seeded in August, following wheat or oats, disk- 

 ing gives better results than plowing. But we do not disk to save 

 time. We must disk and disk until it takes as much time as it 

 would to plow. However, the disking leaves a hard seed bed 

 underneath, it gives us a garden mulch on top, and it leaves the 



