VALUE OF WHITE CLOVER.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume III, Issue 424, 1 November 1876, Page 2

VALUE OF WHITE CLOVER.

I have frequently read articles, says a writer in the Rural New Yorker, in agricultural papers condemniug white clover as a pasture grass. This has never agreed with my experience, as I think it one of themostvaluablegrasses we have. When I was but nine or ten years old my father owned a large farm ; a part he rented to a neighbour fora number of years, but this neighbour 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. I well remember going to this lot barefooted after the horses and how I did delight iu 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 uuless we pastured it late to keep it back to make good hay. So we turned in the above lot about sixty sheep with their lambs and left them in until some lime 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 sheeps’ backs ; white clover about a foot high and timothy about two feet, and we took over forty tons of hay off that field. Any one can judge it must have been thick b cause it was nut tall. About the sane time, I think the s<a-on after taking t ie sheep out o t.:e meadow, we turned them in a sixteen acre lot just across the road and kept them there most of the season ; they kept it eaten down so close it looked as bare as the road. The next spring my father concluded to plough it up, as he thought the sheep had eaten out roots and all; but by the time we were ready to plough if, it began too look so fine we let it be for pasture. But we had plenty of food and did not need it, so we cut it for hay. I don't remember how many tons of hay we took from the field, but it was a great many, of the finest quality of white cloveraud 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 hay, fine fat sheep and lambs, and a thick heavy sod to turn under when you want (o break up, and a certainty of a good crop of anything you may put in of other things being equal.