282 FIELD CROPS 



or it may be spring wheat, oats, or barley. More attention 

 than usual should be devoted to the preparation of the land 

 when grasses are to be sown with these grains, particularly 

 in the way of fining the surface soil before the seed is sown. 

 When the grasses are to be sown with winter wheat, the land 

 should be plowed some weeks previous to seeding time and 

 the seed bed prepared with the disk and smoothing harrows. 

 If any of these grain crops follow corn which has been kept 

 clean of weeds, a good seed bed can be prepared by disking 

 two or three times and then harrowing. The corn rows 

 should be leveled as much as possible in preparing the land. 

 If the ground is to be plowed, deep plowing when the soil 

 breaks up readily is desirable. Plowing when the soil is in 

 proper condition reduces the labor necessary to obtain a 

 good seed bed; fall plowing is usually preferable in the North. 

 Deep plowing increases the water-holding capacity of the 

 soil, and also increases the quantity of available plant food 

 by making the soil more easily penetrable by the roots. 



349. Selection of the Seed. The sowing of good seed 

 is fully as important in forming a meadow as in the planting 

 of any of the grain crops. The seed should be true to name, 

 of strong germination, and free from noxious weed seeds. 

 The seeds of some of the inferior grasses closely resemble 

 those of some of the important ones; for example, Canada 

 blue grass seed is very similar to that of Kentucky blue grass, 

 but Canada blue grass is of much less value. When there 

 is any doubt about the purity of the seed, a sample should 

 be submitted to the nearest seed laboratory for examination. 

 The experiment stations usually make examinations of this 

 kind free of charge. With a simple hand lens and samples 

 of good seed, or good illustrations of them such as are easily 

 obtainable, examinations for purity may readily be made 



