162 MEADOWS AND PASTURES 



afternoon, using the hay-loader and side-delivery rake. 

 Thus with the least cost and effort one gets a large 

 amount of woody and less nutritious hay. 



Growing Clover Seed. Clover should be cut for seed 

 as soon as the most of the heads have turned brown, and 

 left to lie in the sun for a week or more before it is 

 threshed. There are clover bunchers that attach to the 

 mower cutter-bar that will gather the clover as fast as it 

 is cut, or a self-rake reaper may be used. The less the 

 clover is handled the better, since the heads readily break 

 off. If rain comes it will do no harm; in truth, several 

 rains with alternate spells of dry weather will make the 

 clover hull all the easier. I have stacked clover seed 

 with fair success, but it must stay in stack a long time 

 and be well protected from the weather, else it will be 

 too tough to thresh well. Ordinarily it is better to 

 thresh from the field or else wait till a cold day in win- 

 ter, when it may be threshed from the dry stack. Yields 

 of clover seed vary from a few quarts to 10 bushels from 

 an acre. A moderately thin stand, on a soil not too rich, 

 makes the most seed. 



Clover Dodder. Within recent years a new pest has 

 come to cloverfields the slender parasitic vine, called 

 dodder. It is an almost leafless yellow vine found twin- 

 - ing itself about the clover stems which it ties into an in- 

 extricable tangle. Wherever it touches a clover stem it 

 sends a rootlet into it and preys on the juices of the un- 

 fortunate host plant. In time it destroys the clover. It 

 spreads rapidly. Dodder comes from seed and is at first 

 attached to the earth, As soon as it reaches a clover plant 



