VALUE OF WHITE CLOVER.

Dunstan Times, Issue 756, 13 October 1876, Page 4

VALUE OF WHITE CLOVER.

—o — I have frequently read articles, says a writer in tile Rural New Yorker, iii agricultural papers condemning white clover as a pasture grass. This has never agreed with my experience, as I think it one of the most valuable grasses we have. When I was but nine or ton years old my father owned a large farm; a part he rented to a neighbor for a number of years, but this neighbor at the time I was of the above age, sold his- effects and went West. We then worked the whole farm. There was one lot of eighteen acres that had been left by this neighbor for a pasture lot without sowing any seed. 1 well remember going to this lot barefooted after the horses and how [ did delight in travelling over the-white clover ; it was so thick and cool, so soft and velvety that I was loth to leave, A few years later we had a twenty acre lot that we wanted to cut for hay, but we had a good deal of ground to- go over and of course some of it would get pretty ripe unless we pastured it late to keep it back to make good bay So we turned in tbe above lot about sixty sbcep with their lambs arid left them in until some time in June. When we .took them out it didn’t look as if we would ever cut much hay in that lot, but, when we cut the grass, it' was as thick as the wool on the sheep’s backs; white clover about a foot high and timothy about two feet, and wo took over forty tons of hay off that field. Anv one can judge it must have been thick because it was not tall. About the same time, 1 think theseason, aftertaking the sheep out of the meadow we turned them in a sixteen-acre lot just across the road and kept them there mostof the season; thev kept it eaten down so close it looked as bare as the road The next spring my fa the’ - concluded to plough it up, as ho thought tho sheep had eaten out roots and all; hut by the time we were ready to plough it, it began to look so fine we let it he for pasture. But we had plenty of food and did not need it. we cut it for hay. I don’t remember how many tons of hay wo took from the field, but it was a great many, of the finest quality of white clover and timothy, about a half ■of each, that I ever saw before or since. I very early in life came to the conclusion—Keep plenty of sheep and sow clover and you will have the best of pasture for all kinds of stock, bees included, have first-class hav, fine ■fat sheep and lambs, and a thick, heavy sod to turn under when you want to break up and a certainty of a good crop of anything you may put in of other things being equal.