FARM LAWN VERSUS HAY FIELD 21 



THE FARM LAWN. 



just after early haying. When the meadow grass had a setback 

 through premature spring grazing, followed by a drought, we 

 always hayed and occasionally grazed the lawn. Thorough work, 

 including green soiling, application of nitrate of soda, spring and fall 

 sprinkling of lawn seed on worn places and systematic rolling, did 

 much toward making it quite a respectable farm lawn from mid-June 

 until winter, spite of our stolen hay crop. We never raked off the 

 grass cut by the lawn motor, but left it to enrich the soil. The 

 stones that dulled it were buried to form deep draining ditches, and 

 after thorough subsoil ploughing, manure was turned under, to 

 mechanically, as well as chemically, benefit and enrich the soil. A 

 neighbor spent more money in this process than we, going deeper, 

 and in twenty years his lawn never browned during severe drought 

 nor under closest clipping, the grass roots delving too deeply to be 

 affected. Slightly curving lawn contours edged the farm house, but 

 on the main farm lawn no attempt \vas made to fill abrupt depres- 

 sions, smooth hillocks, or break up boulders and blast out ledges, 

 having once had experience in that line to the tune of $3,000 or more, 

 with no pleasanter result than a yard whose stone boundary wall 

 looked like that of a prison. Acres of adjoining land could have 

 been bought for the money put into that unattractive wall. With 

 this expensive warning, hollows in our farm lawn were padded with 

 shrubbery, the most unsightly boulders screened with evergreens, and 

 others partly hidden beneath asexual mosses, lichens and saphrophytic 

 fungi plants. In the midst of rock-strewn corners were planted vari- 

 colored flowering plants, the shade and shelter afforded by the ever- 

 greens enabling us to transplant from the forest a wood carpet of 

 rare and varied velvety beauty. In one particular copse nature 



