MANURES AND HUMUS IN SOIL. 173 



Land is just as easily broken after a heavy crop of sweet 

 clover as after common red, if plowed before the seed plants 

 have made too much growth. Seedling plants do not interfere 

 with wheat. The yearling plant is a little in the way of harvest- 

 ing, but does not injure the crop, unless it should be very thick. 

 It will grow just as well on the poorest stony washed limestone 

 land as on the best of soil. The land cannot be too dry and hot 

 for it to succeed. It does prepare land for alfalfa by loosening, 

 enriching and furnishing the necessary bacteria. It is a drouth 

 resisting plant, and continues to grow through the dryest sum- 

 mers, furnishing an abundance of grazing, while other grasses 

 are parched, and remains green until quite hard freezing. Sweet 

 clover is all right on good land, but it is the man with the worn 

 land who needs it most. On dry land such a thing as an entire 

 failure is out of the question if good seed is sown, no matter at 

 what season of the year, but of course you may expect best re- 

 sults from spring seeding where the seed is covered by any means 

 convenient, or from early winter sowing, when nature will do 

 the covering. When sown for hay I use one bushel of seed to 

 four acres, for grazing or improving land one bushel will be suf- 

 ficient for five or six acres. If sown late in the season and the 

 weather is dry the seed will lay over to the next spring and 

 come all right. Some of the best stands I have ever had were 

 obtained from such conditions. 



Some of the statements made may seem a little extravagant to 

 those not familiar with the plant, yet there is not a particle of 

 exaggeration. Just imagine a growth from six to eight feet high 

 and so thick a man can scarcely walk through it, being left on 

 the land to enrich it and stop wash and to be followed without 

 cost the next season with a growth of seed plants that will form 

 a dense sod and grow to the height of two to three feet, and this 

 process repeated year after year, and add to this the fact that 

 this plant unquestionably attracts to the soil more than double 

 the amount of nitrogen that red clover will under the most favor- 

 able conditions. Can you then wonder that land is so rapidly im- 

 proved?" 



In Wyoming. The Wyoming experiment station 

 reports that lambs fed upon sweet clover hay relished 

 it and throve. It was found that they digested it ex- 

 ceedingly well, and that it contained a very large 

 percentage of digestible protein. It is well known 



