Alfalfa 
5 
I5> I 9°7- ^ consisted of sixty-four plats, each one representing the 
seed of an individual selection, or a regional variety from some state 
or foreign country. 
All the varieties in this nursery could be classed in a general way, 
as Medicago sativa, or common alfalfa. A few of the plats showed 
plants with variegated flowers. These might be classed in the variegat¬ 
ed strains. There were marked contrasts in the type of plants and 
Plate No. 2.—Representative plants of the Hardy and Non-hardy type 
of crowns of four-year-old alfalfa taken from the same nursery, grown a’s 
single plants under the same conditions. The plant on the right, the com¬ 
mon or Southern type; the plant on the left, a fair sample ,of Baltic alfalfa, 
a variety found growing near the little town of Baltic, South Dakota. 
the character of the foliage in different plats. In some plats, 
there was almost as wide a range of contrasts in the different plants 
of the plat. 
The geographical distribution of the seed that was sown in this 
nursery was as follows: Four from Arabia; four from Africa; four 
from South America; four from Spain and Mexico; eight from the 
Western parts of the United States; eight from the northern states 
and northern Europe and thirty-two plats of Turkestan alfalfa from 
different sources. 
Each plat was planted with 200 hills; twenty inches apart each 
way, ten rows of twenty hills each. The plats were separated by a 
forty inch path between all the plats. The hills were thinned to 
