12 CLOVER CULTURE. 



ling" clover. They regard the red as a species that produces 

 two crops in a year, and seed only in the second crop, and the 

 mammoth as a variety that produces seed in the first crop but 

 furnishes none in thesecond." This is a mistake. The common 

 red does produce seed the first erop wherever it has an opportu- 

 nity of insect fertilization. We have cut on our own farms as 

 much as three bushels of seed per acre from the first crop and 

 from a thin stand, but ordinarily it is only the late blooms 

 that become fertilized. This is owing to the scarcity of 

 bumble bees, and to the fact that during the season of first 

 blossoming there is 'an abundance of preferred bloom which 

 prevents the Italian bees from visiting the clover. 

 Farmers have abundant proof of this fact when they cut tim- 

 othy for seed, in which they find more or less clover seed 

 when the common red is grown with timothy. The mam- 

 moth would yield a second crop if the season were long 

 enough. If a mixed crop of mammoth and medium red is cut 

 by the I5th of June, or even the aoth, and the season is 

 favorable, many plants of the mammoth will ripen seed, 

 and if they are both cut by the loth of June, a crop of seed 

 may be expected from both. As proof of this we cite the fact 

 that we have mown a meadow of mixed varieties for ten years 

 and the mammoth in this meadow holds its own, which it 

 could not do were it not annually ripening seeds. ' It has 

 never, except on one occasion, been mowed prior to the 4th 

 of July . The mammoth is simply a late-maturing variety oi 

 tri/olium pratense, the botanical name for both, its season oi 

 growth being from two to three weeks longer for the crop 

 than that of the medium red. This distinction will be more 

 fully pointed out when we come to discuss the best methods 

 of the management of each. These two varieties ol the trifo- 

 lium pratense have a very wide distribution, being co-exten- 

 sive with the limestone and calcareous soils over the entire 

 continent v .limited on these only by the amount of rainfall. 

 They grow luxuriantly on all the limestone soils of the East- 

 ern and Middle states and refuse to grow with a profitable 

 luxuriance wherever the rocks are deficient in the mineral ele- 

 ments peculiar to these soils. They reach far south on the 

 Appalachian range, and their limitation by soil formation is 

 most striking in Tennessee: They grow luxuriantly in Mid- 

 dle and East Tennessee, but whenever we pass west of the 

 carboniferous formations into West Tennessee, they there dis- 

 appear or fail to grow in desirable luxuriance/ They may 

 be found in North Alabama and Georgia, and even far south. 



