Search -
Pleasant Talk about Fruits, Flowers and Farming
Pleasant Talk about Fruits Flowers and Farming Author:Henry Ward Beecher Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: fragrance, or odor of any sort except a faint smell of old wood, or more pungent odor of mold. We say, in conclusion, grass should not be left so long that it... more » will be already dry and cured before it is cut; and, after grass is once down, it is not to be treated like flax, and left to bleach and rot, but should be got in as soon as possible. Farmers whose hay is on the stack or in the mow may laugh at this article; those whose hay is not stacked or in the barn had better do something besides laugh. LAYING DOWN LAND TO GRASS. We shall speak of the kinds and quality of seed, and of the time and manner of putting them in. We think our farmers err in not sowing enough kinds of seed together. The objects to be secured are very early grass in the spring, a heavy body of hay, a rapid after-growth, and the greatest amount which the soil can yield. No one grass can be found capable of meeting all these ends. Some are very early, but not heavy enough or sufficiently nutritious for the main crop ; others are admirable for hay, but do not start readily again after cutting. By judiciously mixing different sorts of grasses, any one of these objects may be secured and the meadow be admirable both for the scythe and for pasturage. Nor can the soil be made to yield all of which it is capable in any other way; for a square foot of ground may be able to sustain but a certain number of roots of any one kind of grass, and yet many support, in addition, as much more of another kind, since different species of grass draw their nourishment from different portions of the soil— the fibrous-rooted grasses from the surface, and tap-rooted plants from the lower strata of the soil, while broad-leaved vegetation, as clovers, lucerne, etc., draw very much oftheir support from the air.- Indeed, this...« less