260 MANAGEMENT OF GRASS LANDS. 



gressed, when they are opened at nine or ten o'clock on a fair day, the hay 

 turned over between eleven and three, and soon after turning gathered again, 

 for the cart. Thus cured, the hay is perfectly bright and sweet, and hardly a 

 blossom or leaf wasted. Care is required in making the cocks. The grass is 

 collected with forks and placed on dry ground, between the swarths, in as 

 small a compass as convenient at the base, say two or three feet in diameter, 

 and rising in a cone to the height of four or five feet. Ib. 



The advantages of this mode of curing clover are: 1. The labour of 

 spreading from the swarth is saved. 2. The labour of the hand-rake is 

 abridged, or may be wholly dispensed with, if the horse-rake is used to glean 

 the field when the hay is taken off; the forks sufficing to collect it tolerably 

 clean in the cocking process. 3. It prevents, in a great measure, injury from 

 dew and rain; for these cocks, if rightly constructed, (not by rolling,) will sus- 

 tain a rain of some days that is, they nave done so with me without heating 

 or becoming more than superficially wet. 4. Clover hay made in this way 

 may almost invariably be housed in good condition; and it rain falls after the 

 grass is mown, the quality of the hay is infinitely superior to what it would be 

 under the old process of curing. Ib. 



The rationale is this. The outside of the clover parts with much of its 

 moisture while in swarth; and what is called the sweating, in cock, is merely 

 the passage of moisture remaining in the succulent stocks, to their exterior, 

 and to their leaves and blossoms it is a diffusion an equalization of the re- 

 maining moisture in the cock. When this has taken place, evaporation is 

 greatly facilitated, and the whole mass acquires a uniform dryness, on open- 

 ing the cocks to the influence of the sun and winds, if too long an exposure is 

 guarded against. Evaporation progresses in the cocks, after the hay is gather- 

 ed for the cart, and during the operation of loading and unloading. Ib. 



The late JOHN LORAIN, a philosopher and a practical farmer, 

 after stating the advantages he had observed arising from the 

 practice of curing hay in the swarth, namely, a saving of labour; 

 that the grasses are turned at all times very expeditiously; that 

 by turning the swarths throughout long continued rains, so 

 long as the undersides of them were likely to be injured by 

 fermentation, he had saved extensive fields of hay, while his 

 neighbours, who gave no attention to this interesting subject, 

 had their crops entirely ruined. After stating these advan- 

 tages advantages in which he had personally participated 

 he says in the very next paragraph, that "curing hay in 

 swarthy to save the juices, seems to be not only practically 

 wrong, but also opposed to reason." 



Salt hay in this country has usually been burnt by lying 

 too long in the swarths. The method in which I have treated 

 it for several years, is to cock it the day after it is cut, and 

 carry it in, without delaying more than one day, and put a 

 layer of some kind of dry straw between load and load of it in 

 the mow, to prevent it taking damage by over-heating. The 

 straw contracts or imbibes so much of its moisture and salt- 

 ness, that the cattle will eat it very freely; and the hay is far 

 better than that made in the common way.* 



* DEAN'S New England Farmer. 



