Study 33. The Progress of the Season The program of this study includes a trip over the fields and gardens of the farm, map in hand, noting, inspecting and recording the more striking seasonal activities of the growing things. To determine whether vegetative increase of field-crop plants is going on, specimens will have to be dug up and examined root and branch. The record. I. On the map of the field, the principal crops may be recorded directly, and their stage of advancement briefly indicated. 2. An annotated list may be made of all the crops observed, giving location (as by name or number of the field), area, stage of advancement (as germination, height, blossoming, etc.), condition (good, poor, weedy, infested with plantlice, etc.). Include, besides field-crops, fruit and truck-crops and pastures. XXXIV. THE CLOVERS "Now, Cousin Clover, tell me in mine ear; Sidney Lanier (Clover), "Knee-deep in clover" is a purely agricultural figure of speech. No one who has seen the pigs or the heifers turned out into a clover-field of a summer morning, will need to be told that it signifies complete and unalloyed satisfaction. Nor does it mean merely pleasures of the palate, even for the beasts; for they gaze on the clover, sniff at it and take deep breaths, and lie down and roll in it. Doubtless there was clover in Eden. There are many kinds of clover, and they are of varying utility to us. Of all groups of cultivated plants, there is hardly another that is intimately bound up with so many agricultural interests. Clovers furnish green forage, both for pasture and for soiling. They furnish hay-hay that sets a standard of quality for all other hay; hay so rich in proteins, it needs to be diluted with other forage for ordinary feeding; and that, alone, is ground and used like meal. The clovers also supply fertilizers to the soil, especially nitrogenous fertilizers: directly, when plowed under and decomposed; and indirectly, through the action of the nitrogen-gathering bacteria that live in the nodules on their roots. The practice of rotation of crops depends for its success largely on the work of the clovers in replenishing the supply of available nitrogen in the soil. Both by the deep penetration of their roots, opening up the hard subsoil to the ingress of air and water, and by the materials they contribute in their decay, they leave the soil in better condi FIG. 86. White clover. (This and other pared by Miss Olive N. Tuttle for this book drawings bearing the same monogram pre tion for subsequent crops. Most other crops deplete the soil, but the clovers enrich it, and restore its fertility. The clovers also furnish the finest of the honey crop especially white clover, which fills the land with the fragrance of its nectar in June. Among them are excellent soilbinders for holding together the surface layers of eroding hill slopes; excel lent cover-crops for the orchard in the dry season; and excellent plants for the lawn and the fence-row. And besides all these very practical matters, there is their beauty! Crimson clover, red clover, white clover-what neatness and elegance of design in the single sprays; what beauty of leaf form; what freshness of flowers! And in mass, also, they give fine landscape effects— the red outspread over the plain like a carpet of roses; the white sprinkled over the green hills like flakes of fugitive snow. All the clovers are deep-rooting herbs that grow in spreading tufts and bear trifoliate leaves, having stipules at the base of the leaf-stalk. They have small flowers in clusters, and short, few-seeded FIG. 87. Red clover. pods. The true clovers (members of the genus Trifolium) produce their flowers in heads: the others (sweet clovers of the genus Melilotus and the medics of the genus Medicago) bear them in more open spike-like racemes. Red and crimson clovers are the most striking species of the fields, but in northern latitudes our native white clover is the hardiest and the most widespread of all. It grows in fields and pastures and copses everywhere, often from self-sown seed. Its creeping stems, ON FIG. 89. Alsike clover. FIG. 88. White sweet-clover. striking root wherever they touch the ground, fit it for life in pastures and in lawns. From its sweet flowers, the whitest of all honey is gathered by the bees. Alsike clover is a similar but more robust, imported species, with lax stems, not rooting at the nodes, and with rose-tinted flowers. Buffaloclover is another rather obscure native species, with piebald, red and white flowers. Then there are two other kinds of imported true clovers of very different appearance: the tall, branching, rabbit's foot clover, with its whitish corollas hidden among long and silky calyx lobes, which, combined together in the soft heads, suggest the name it bears; and two delicate little yellow-flowered hop-clovers. The sweet clovers are two species of tall fragrant roadside weeds, similar in appearance except that one bears white, and the other yellow flowers. The white sweet clover (fig. 88) is able to follow the road grader and take possession of and thrive in the The medics differ from the sweet having bent or spirally twisted pods, instead of straight ones. They also have shorter flower clusters. One of them, alfalfa, is of vast importance as a forage crop. It has purple flowers. The others are unimportant, yellow-flowered species that we find in waste places. Of all the array of clovers, only the white clover and a few of its nearest allies in the genus Trifolium are native American plants. But all of them are interesting and worthy of a little careful study. |