132 HOW TO GROW GOOD CLOVER. 



stone and chalk districts sainfoin is grown as a per- 

 manent crop, and formerly lasted six or eight years. 

 In the eastern counties the little there grown is by 

 way of a shifting crop, in the same place and manner 

 as common clover. The permanency of sainfoin is 

 yearly becoming greatly diminished from the circum- 

 stance that its seed is so much mixed with that of the 

 burnet, Poterium sanguisorba, var. muricata. To such 

 an extent does this evil occur, that we have examined 

 samples of sainfoin seed in which there were at the 

 rate of from twenty to forty thousand of burnet seed- 

 pods per bushel; and when we consider that these 

 pods have for the most part two ripened seeds, and 

 those of a plant growing so much more rapidly than 

 the sainfoin, we can form some notion how the 

 desired crop is soon smothered and overpowered by 

 the burnet, which at best is but a rank weed, of no 

 agricultural value ; for whatever of good there may 

 be in our ordinary native salad burnet, which is a 

 smaller and more succulent plant, this sticky foreign 

 interloper cannot possibly have any claim to our 

 regard. 



The reason why it has gone on so long unchal- 

 lenged is that the burnet-seed, though of an entirely 

 different shape from the sainfoin, is somewhat of the 

 same colour; and then in their growth both plants have 

 winged leaves, and the difference between the entire 

 leaflets of the sainfoin and the toothed leaflets of the 

 burnet did not at first strike the farmer ; now, however, 

 the difference is better understood, and farmers begin 

 to require that the burnet-seed shall be sifted from 

 the sainfoin. This of course will demand the payment 

 of a better price for the better sample, as in the 

 process of sifting many of the smaller sainfoin seeds 



