FIFTEENTH ANNUAL MEETING. 147 



in the physical condition of the soil and put it in condition to 

 yield a good succeeding crop. 



The summer is not needed to do this, for the plant grows 

 in late fall, winter and early spring. The chemist tells us that 

 quite twenty-five dollars would be needed to purchase fertilizer 

 in the open market to equal the fertilizing value of one crop of 

 crimson clover. This laboratory test of value is borne out by 

 practical results, a few of which are given. Eleven consecu- 

 tive crops of apples, with no fertilizer but crimson clover, the 

 last crop as large and good as any, and the trees grown where 

 only a few years ago ten bushels of corn per acre was the 

 usual crop. A crop of six bushels of wheat per acre, and on the 

 the same land a few years after, sixty bushels of shelled corn 

 per acre. The corn crop chiefly the result of one crop of crimson 

 clover. On soil too poor to be of any use, after a good stand 

 of crimson clover was dressed with two hundred pounds of 

 soluble phosphate rock and four hundred pounds of muriate 

 of potash per acre, and then gave a large hay crop, and also 

 the same season was planted to corn on July first, and produced 

 thirty-four bushels of shelled corn per acre without other dress- 

 ing. 



As a live winter orchard cover it is unexcelled, preventing- 

 leaching, washing, and from our light soils, blowing of the 

 dust ; in other words, by its use our real estate is not movable. 

 A gentleman from Alaine who had been through Dela- 

 ware a number of times, was much pleased this year with the 

 beautiful, green fields of whea^ where, in former years, dry, 

 weedy peach orchards only greeted the eye during the winter. 

 There is now no excuse for any orchard not meeting the 

 artistic side of man all the seasons of the year. One drawback 

 to continuous use of crimson clover in orchards is too much 

 nitrogen, and consequently too much wood growth; to adjust 

 this condition some are using strap-leaf or cowhorn turnips 

 for cover crops, with good results. The old remedy for worn- 

 out land was rest, but Nature never rests, and the cover crop 

 system only follows Nature's teaching. Look at the bleak 

 hillside and the brown level plain in a country of rainfall, and 

 look quickly, for Nature will soon cover them with her in- 

 numerable shades of vegetable life. Some of those chance 



