4 
The Colorado Experiment Station. • 
season in a comparative test, with common alfalfa and some Turke¬ 
stan seed from Germany, furnished through Professor W. H. Olin. 
This test the first season revealed a better seed production in the 
plants grown from seed selected for heavy yielding traits, but the 
second season’s growth revealed the superior hay producing quali¬ 
ties of the Turkestan plants, which also yielded as high as an ounce 
of seed from a single plant. The selections that season were princi¬ 
pally from the Turkestan plants, descriptions of which were reported 
in Bulletin 121, Colorado Experiment Station. Through Mr. J. M. 
Westgate, of the Department of Agriculture, a large list of foreign 
and native strains of alfalfa seed from different states were secured 
for a wider base of comparison in the preliminary nursery work 
of selecting the best strain for the improvement of the qualities de¬ 
sired in alfalfa. 
The new alfalfa nursery planted the past season comprises 
sixty-four different varieties or promising individual selections, 
each planted at the same time and given the same care and condi¬ 
tions, and could be considered under a fair comparative test. Each 
plat was designed to contain two hundred individual plants, twenty 
inches apart each way,*and each plat separated by a path forty inches 
wide. 
The plats are designated in the following manner, the first tier 
of plats on the north are lettered “A” and numbered from east to 
west, one to eight, the next tier to the south is lettered “B” and the 
plats in the tier are numbered the same as the first tier, and so on, 
the eight tiers are lettered to correspond to the first eight letters of 
the alphabet. 
The individual plants in a plat are designated by two numbers, 
the first denotes the number of the row in the plat, which is num¬ 
bered from north to south, the second number denotes the plant in 
the rows, which are also numbered, but from the east to-the west. 
The nursery was planted April 15, 1907, and thinned to single 
plants about the middle of July. The following is an epitome of 
the first season’s observations: 
Plat A-1—^Individual selection No. 1, from Turkestan variety, 183 plants. 
Irregular in type, undesirable for hay or seed compared to 
others. 
Plat A-2—'Individual selection No. 2, from Turkestan variety, 163 plants. 
Irregular in type, rather subject to fungus diseases. 
Plat A-3—Individual selecttion No. 6, from Turkestan variety, 14 6 plants. 
Irregular in type, but fair for hay, no seed formed. 
Plat A-4*—Individual seilection No. 17 (from single plant on railroad right- 
of-way, grown without irrigation). Very uniform in type, up¬ 
right in growth, fine stems and leaves, good hay type and fair 
set of seed, 165 plants. Very continuous in bloom. 
Plat A-5*—Individual selection No. 12, from Turkestan plants, 179 plants. 
Irregular type, coarse stems, very sprangly growth, leaves shed 
off badly, no seed. 
♦See Plates. 
