Value As A Fertilizer
Category:
ALFALFA
The high value of this plant as a fertilizer
and soil improver cannot be questioned. But whether it should ever be
sown for such a use will depend on the capacity of the soil to produce
other crops valuable for fertilizing and also more valuable for
producing forage or fodder. Where other clovers more useful can be
grown, also cow peas, soy beans and other legumes valuable for food
uses, it would seem unwise to sow sweet clover. This would restrict its
use, therefore, as a soil renovator; first, to soils too poor to grow
those useful legumes; second, to areas where the climate conditions will
not admit of the growth of these; and third, to areas from which the
surface soil has been removed, and which it is desirable to so
ameliorate and improve the soil thus laid bare that it could later be
covered with some more valuable cover crop. Under present conditions
this would restrict its growth for the purpose named to sandy and
gravelly soils, to certain areas in the semi-arid region east of the
Rocky Mountains, and to such small areas as the surface soil had been
removed from.
In the semi-arid region where crops of grain and also some varieties of
field corn can be grown successfully, but where the clovers are not
successful; it would seem practicable to sow a few pounds of sweet
clover seed per acre at the same time as the grains, and to plow under
the plants produced some time in the month of May the next season. The
clover thus buried could be at once followed by corn or potatoes, or,
indeed, by any kind of a cleaning crop. The high price of seed at
present practically forbids growing clover thus.
Whether sweet clover grown for renovating uses should be turned under
the season in which it has been sown will depend largely on the growth
that has been made. In many instances, the growth made is so rank as to
justify plowing it under the following autumn. In other instances,
better results will follow plowing it under the next season. It
frequently happens that the growth made is so rank that a strong plow
and also a strong team are necessary to do the work properly.
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Value On Alkali SoilsPrevious:
Value For Bee Pasture
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