tempt.

We can make our land poor, by growing clover, and selling it; or, we can
make our land rich, by growing clover, and feeding it out on the farm.
Or, rather, we can make our land rich, by draining it where needed,
cultivating it thoroughly, so as to develope the latent plant-food
existing in the soil, and then by growing clover to take up and organize
this plant-food. This is how to make land rich by growing clover. It is
not, in one sense, the clover that makes the land rich; it is the
draining and cultivation, that furnishes the food for the clover. The
clover takes up this food and concentrates it. The clover does not
create the plant-food; it merely saves it. It is the thorough
cultivation that enriches the land, not the clover.

"I wish," writes a distinguished New York gentleman, who has a farm of
barren sand, "you would tell us whether it is best to let clover ripen
and rot on the surface, or plow it under when in blossom? I have heard
that it gave more nitrogen to the land to let it ripen and rot on it,
but as I am no chemist, I do not know."

If, instead of plowing under the clover--say the last of June, it was
left to grow a month longer, it is quite possible that the clover-roots
and seed would contain more nitrogen than they did a month earlier. It
was formerly thought that there was a loss of nitrogen during the
ripening process, but the evidence is not altogether conclusive on the
point. Still, if I had a piece of sandy land that I wished to enrich by
clover, I do not think I should plow it under in June, on the one hand,
or let it grow until maturity, and rot down, on the other. I should
rather prefer to mow the crop just as it commenced to blossom, and let
the clover lie, spread out on the land, as left by the machine. There
would, I think, be no loss of fertilizing elements by evaporation, while
the clover-hay would act as a mulch, and the second growth of clover
would be encouraged by it. Mow this second crop again, about the first
week in August. Then, unless it was desirable to continue the process
another year, the land might be plowed up in two or three weeks, turning
under the two previous crops of clover that are on the surface, together
with the green-clover still growing. I believe this would be better than
to let the clover exhaust itself by running to seed.

CHAPTER XXV.

DR. VOELCKER'S EXPERIMENTS ON CLOVER.

In the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, fo