Bureau of Agkicultuee. 249 



started several years ago. The grass makes a dense 

 fine growth for lawn, of velvety softness, but becomes 

 brown with the first frosts and remains so until rather 

 late spring. This defect will lead to its rejection 

 wherever blue grass can be grown, but in southwestern 

 Kentucky it is more at home, and some fairly satisfac- 

 tory growths of it are to be seen in the yards about the 

 Illinois Central Eailroad buildings at Fulton, Kentucky. 

 The grass is not productive enough in Kentucky to sat- 

 isfy our farmers. In the plots and elsewhere in the 

 State, the growth is only from about eleven to fourteen 

 inches high when the plants are in bloom. It is a valua- 

 ble grass farther south, but will probably never be gen- 

 erally grown in this State. Johnson grass is another 

 southern species grown by me. It is a coarse, tall plant, 

 furnishing fodder relished by stock, but because of its 

 disposition to persist in soils when once established, our 

 farmers are afraid of it. It does not in our soils make 

 the close growth necessary to productiveness. In Ken- 

 tucky it is regarded as a weed. Farmers sometimes 

 write us asking how it may be got rid of. The best way 

 known to me is close cultivation and winter plowing to 

 throw up the root-stocks by which it spreads so as to 

 expose them to frost, or else, close grazing. 



We have been accustomed to place the common red 

 clover at the head of its group, and it has been entitled 

 to that distinction. But at times it has not done well in 

 some parts of Kentucky, and farmers in these sections 

 despair of ever again raising this clover as successfully 

 as it was raised years ago. There is some ground for 

 this discouragement, but I think the difficulty will, like 

 others that have appeared from time to time, be even- 

 tually overcome, or run its course, when clover will 

 again thrive on land now clover sick. Undoubtedly some 

 of the difficulty is due to the small beetle described in 

 one of our bulletins. Some of it is the work of bacteria 

 or fungi. Some failures are due to poor seeds. It is 

 certainly not due to lack of nodule bacteria in the soil. 

 There is no difficulty in getting an abundance of nodules 

 on the roots, in fact in some of our experimental work 

 we have found it difficult to keep the nodule bacteria away 

 from them. They are so numerous and so generally 



