34 CIRCULAR 863, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



Hulling and scarifying can be done by a clover huller or by 

 one of the commercial scarifiers now in general use. For scarify- 

 ing small quantities for home use, a barrel scarifier (15), which 

 may be made at home, or an old concrete mixer may be used. 

 The container should have 1.5 pounds of gravel to 1 pound of 

 seed. The stones should range from one-half to three-quarters of 

 an inch in diameter. When the seed has been hulled in these 

 machines, it is also scarified. 



Appearance, Weight, and Number of Seeds 



The unhulled seed is brown, about one-eighth of an inch long, 

 pointed, slightly reticulated, and hairy. The calyx of sericea 

 very rarely remains with the pod; that of the annual lespedezas 

 commonly does remain. The hulled seed is shaped like red clover 

 seed but is smaller, greenish yellow, and somewhat mottled with 

 brown (fig. 12). A measured bushel of clean sericea seed in the 

 hull weighs about 34 pounds; hulled seed, 60 pounds. There are 

 between 275,000 and 300,000 seeds in a pound of unhulled and 

 335,000 to 375,000 in a pound of scarified seed. A seeding rate 

 of 20 pounds of scarified seed per acre will, if evenly distributed, 

 place some 770 to 850 seeds on each square foot of surface. The 

 loss in weight in hulling should not exceed 25 percent. Higher 

 losses up to 40 or more percent have been reported, but this was 

 probably because the unhulled seed was not well cleaned. 



Figure 12. — Pods and sseds of Lesp^deza cuneata. (About 2 times natural 



size.) 



WILDLIFE USES 



All lespedeza seeds are relished by birds, and plantings of sericea 

 have been proved to be well suited to this purpose. Not only are 

 the seeds useful for food but the plants make an ideal cover for 

 quail. The fact that the seeds are borne some distance from the 

 ground and hang on until well into the winter is an additional 

 advantage in sections where snow may make it difficult for birds 

 to get the seeds of low-growing plants. In a study of quail foods 

 Stoddard (36) found that when quail had become accustomed to 



