No. 7. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 441 



meadow land or on a soil improvement crop. If you are growing 

 rye and you want to turn that rye down to improve the land you 

 can get more out of the manure by applying it to that land so you 

 have a good heavy crop to turn down. 



1 take the manure spreader and spread manure over this pasture 

 field. Try a small acreage at first. If you have fifty acres, try five 

 or ten acres, cut it off from the balance of the field. I use the woven 

 wire fence for that pur]»(>se. Apply the lime and manure if you 

 have it. I have applied commercial fertilizer, but I will speak of 

 that later, and then put on some grass seed. There is little or no 

 life in that soil, no plants there; so you want to sow some seed 

 and this is one very important question for the farmer to consider. 

 Twenty-five years ago, when I was a boy, my father would send me 

 out to sow timothy seed or sow the ground to grass and we never 

 thought of sowing anything but timothy seed, especially for per- 

 manent pasture. I sowed about a gallon to tlie acre and then we 

 waited about two or three years for it to sod up. Now it sods u]) 

 the next year with weeds if you don't put useful plants there. T 

 think timothy is a very poor plant to sow alone in the pasture. It 

 does not last long; it is a soil robber. It feeds on the surface, still I 

 use a little of it. I sow four pounds each of timothy orchard grass 

 and red top to the acre. I don't know what you think about orchard 

 grass. Some farmers say they would just as soon have broom sedge, 

 but I like any kind of grass that makes the Winter shorter and 

 orchard grass shortens the Winter. It stands late in the Fall and 

 comes early in the Spring. So we sow a little orchard grass. Red 

 top will grow in an acid soil. It will grow in a sweet soil as well. 

 It will also grow in a wet soil. If any of that land ought to be tile 

 drained it will pay to do it. It won't pay to grass wet land. The 

 red top grows in rich land. Of course, all plants do. It will also 

 grow in poor land. It makes the sod thick and for that purpose 

 I like to mix some red top, say four to six pounds. Then I would 

 put in some Kentucky blue grass. 



It is the greatest of all grasses in the United States and if you 

 have plenty of lime in your land I am sure you can grow it. I sow 

 from seven to eight pounds of Kentucky blue grass and I would be 

 sure that the seed would grow. A good many farmers do not like 

 to sow it because they say the seed don't grow. 1 want to tell you 

 what the trouble is in many cases. In Kentucky they gather the 

 seed with a one horse stripper. They drive over the pasture lands 

 in June and strip this seed off and put it in bags holding from eight 

 to ten bushels. The farmers sell this seed often before they get it 

 into the barn. The dealers come out from the city and buy it in the 

 field and haul it to the railroad and ship to some warehouse and 

 there it becomes heated and then we buy it and don't get any blue 

 grass when we sow it. Since I have learned this I have been buying 

 my blue grass seed directly from farmers in Kentucky, those who are 

 responsible and they send me good seed and I have no trouble to 

 get it to grow, 



I would not stop with that because we have not ]>ut anything in 

 the mixture that will add any plant food to the soil. Nitrogen is 

 the only element of ])lant food that we can grow into Ihe soil, and 

 this is gotten there by growing some legume. I sow nearly all the 

 clovers. I would sow at least two pounds of white perennial clover, 

 that will stay in the land indefinitely; two pounds at least of red 



