The seed crop cures quickly. It may be drawn and threshed at once, or it
may be stacked and threshed when convenient. If stacked, a goodly supply
of old hay or straw should be put next the ground, and much care should
be taken to protect the clover by finishing off the stack carefully with
some kind of grass or hay that will shed the rain easily. Since the
heads are very small and numerous, and since, as with all clovers, they
break off easily when ripe, much promptness and care should be exercised
in harvesting the seed crop. The best machine for threshing a seed so
small is the clover huller.
The yields of seed will run all the way from less than 3 bushels per
acre to 5 bushels, and some crops have been harvested in Wisconsin which
gave 7 bushels per acre. Four bushels would probably be about an average
yield. As the price is usually relatively high compared with other
clovers, the seed from white clover would be quite remunerative were it
not that in a dry season the yield is disappointing. In some instances
two crops are grown in succession; in others, one crop is reaped. The
land is then sown to barley the next year, and the following year clover
seed may be reaped again without sowing a second time. Usually, after
two successive crops of seed have been cut, blue grass crowds the
clover.
It should be possible to grow prodigious crops of white clover in
certain of the northern Rocky Mountain valleys, as, for instance, in
Montana and Washington, where the conditions for the application of
water to grow the plants and of withholding the same when ripening the
seed are completely under the control of the husbandman. The soils in
these valleys, as previously intimated, have high adaptation for growing
white clover.
=Renewing.=--White clover is probably more easily renewed than any plant
of the clover family. In fact, it seldom requires renewal in a pasture
in which it has obtained a footing as long as it remains a pasture. This
arises from the abundance of the seed production and from the power of
the same to retain germinating properties for a long period.
Nevertheless, there may be instances when it may be wise to scatter more
seed in the early spring in a pasture in which white clover may not be
sufficiently abundant. It is also renewed, in a sense, when suitable
fertilizer is applied on the pastures. A dressing of potash will greatly
stimulate the growth of any kind of clover on nearly all soils; hence,
the marked increase in the growth of the clover that usually follows the
application of a dressing of wood ashes, especially in the unleached
form. Top-dressings of farmyard manure are also quite helpful to such
growth.
The conclusion must not be reached that because white clover is not much
in evidence in a permanent pasture for one or two, or even three dry
seasons, if these should follow each other, that it will not come again
and with great vigor and in much abundance when a wet season arrives
again.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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