TO INCREASE THE HAY CROP. 205 



and have faith in them. It is not because we like corn and 

 roots less that we thus speak, but because we like hay more. 

 We should be sorry to confine our cattle to dry hay alone for 

 the six long months of our winter ; but if we cannot have both 

 hay and roots, we speak for the hay. It is for the animal what 

 bread is for man, the staff of his life. 



How, then, can we increase the quantity and quality of our 

 hay crop ? We reply, in the first place, by sowing a greater 

 quantity and variety of seed. Our ancestors sowed no grass 

 seed at all, relying for a crop of hay solely upon the spontane- 

 ous production of the soil. A step in advance of this was the 

 practice of sowing the refuse seed scattered on the barn floor 

 and around the haystack. Another step was sowing a small 

 quantity of two or three varieties of clean, selected seed; and 

 we have another long step to take, and sow liberally of half a 

 dozen, or even a dozen of the hundreds of the different grasses 

 that we find growing naturally in our fields. " He that soweth 

 sparingly shall reap also sparingly, and he that soweth bounti- 

 fully shall reap also bountifully," is emphatically true in the 

 hay crop. We remember the time when the custom was to 

 sow twelve quarts of grass seed to the acre — generally eight 

 quarts of Timothy and four of clover. This gives about four- 

 teen million seeds, or three hundred to the square foot, and 

 this would be a sufficiency if we could be assured of an equal 

 distribution and certain germination ; but this is impossible. 

 Besides the difficulty of an even distribution, many of the seeds 

 are spurious, some are devoured by birds and insects, and more 

 still are lost by having too much or too little depth of earth — 

 generally the former. Most of our grass seeds germinate most 

 surely when only covered one-fourth of an inch, and by actual 

 experiment it has been ascertained that when covered an inch 

 half the seeds fail. 



We can learn something of the necessity of abundant seed- 

 sowing by observing how bountifully nature provides seed, so 

 as to guard against all contingencies, and to insure the repro- 

 duction of the plant, which seems to be the great aim of all 

 vegetation. A bushel of Timothy will average over fifty million 

 seeds ; an acre of corn will produce seed enough to re-stock two 

 hundred acres. Let us imitate nature and sow more bountifully 

 that we may also reap more bountifully. It may be possible to 

 overstock land with grass seed ; but we have never known such 



