Choice of Cover Crops. 189 
The kinds of cover crops.—It will now be asked 
what is the best plant for cover and green manure. 
It is hard to tell. Clover is a stand-by, but it 
often fails to “catch” late in the season, and it 
should stand on the land an entire season in order 
to obtain its full value. Upon good and _ well- 
tilled lands and in favorable seasons, considerable 
herbage can be obtained for turning under in the 
spring if it is sown the preceding August or Sep- 
tember; but in general it is unreliable as an annual 
erop, and is not adapted to fruit lands. 
It should be said at the outset that the choice 
of the proper crop for the covering of an orchard 
is a local matter, the same as the determination of 
the method of tillage or the kind of fertilizer is. 
There is also no one cover crop which is best for all 
purposes and all conditions. The grower must 
study the condition of his trees and his land, and 
then judge as best he may what course he shall pur- 
sue. Nature’s cover crops, at least upon farms, are 
weeds,-and these may be useful if allowed to grow 
in the fall after the tillage is completed. The 
difficulty is that they cannot always be relied upon to 
cover the land at the +ime when they are wanted, 
most of them do not live through the winter, and 
they are very likely to become a serious nuisance. 
It is best, therefore, to substitute some other plant 
for the weeds. In approaching the question of the 
ehoice of cover crops, the grower must remember that 
there are two great classes in respect to their 
power to gather nitrogen. The one class is non- 
