SAND, OR HAIRY VETCH 109 
poor or worn-out soil. With it the American farmer 
can make his soil produce as it has never produced since 
it was rescued from the wilderness. 
Vetch is the remedy for clover-sick soil. If alfalfa 
is the most valuable forage plant ever discovered, vetch 
is the most valuable fertilizing plant ever discovered. 
Vetch builds on its roots so many pretty little homes 
for the busy nitrogen-gatherers, who so mysteriously 
draw from the great storehouse of nitrogen situated in 
the air above the soil great quantities of the precious, 
most valuable acquisition to the soil, nitrogen. 
Vetch is no respecter of soils. It settles down and 
makes its home with the rich or poor clay as well as the 
rich or poor sand, and commences its business of soil 
restoration at once. It has no terrors of frost or 
drought. Winter will grasp it with its hand and hold 
it in its icy clasp for months and months, and when the 
warm sunshine of spring releases it, it smiles with its 
freshness of green and continues doing business at the 
old stand. The drought of fall, spring or summer will 
blow its oven breath upon it, but it heeds it not, and 
continues its business of storing fertility in the soil as 
though it was being constantly caressed with refreshing 
showers. 
It finds the soil sick, impoverished and dying. It 
touches it with its restoring power, and under its stimu- 
lating touch the soil awakens with new and renewed 
life, pouring out its wealth of plant growth that ripens 
into food for beast and man. 
It will yet enter upon the abandoned farm, banish the 
desolation of the fields, fill the unoccupied farmhouse 
