. Farm grasses of the United States; a practical treatise on the grass crop, seeding and management of meadows and pastures, descriptions of the best varieties, the seed and its impurities, grasses for special conditions, etc., etc. ity markets,and even better hay than timothy will usually sell at alower price because horsemen know what timothy hayis and are not familiar with orchard-grass hay. Howthe two would stand in the favor of feeders if bothwere equally known has never been determined. Ex-perimenters have very generally recommended orchard-grass very highly. The fadl that, in adlual far
. Farm grasses of the United States; a practical treatise on the grass crop, seeding and management of meadows and pastures, descriptions of the best varieties, the seed and its impurities, grasses for special conditions, etc., etc. ity markets,and even better hay than timothy will usually sell at alower price because horsemen know what timothy hayis and are not familiar with orchard-grass hay. Howthe two would stand in the favor of feeders if bothwere equally known has never been determined. Ex-perimenters have very generally recommended orchard-grass very highly. The fadl that, in adlual farmpradlice, orchard-grass hay would be cut at all stagesfrom blooming to maturity of the seed, would un-doubtedly make the quality of the hay very irregular,and thus render it unpopular. The uneven charadter of orchard-grass sod, as seenin Fig. 32, also tends to render it unpopular withfarmers. It is no small task to ride a mower over anorchard-grass meadow. The small tussocks which 158 FARM GRASSES OF THE UNITED STATES from the sod give the mower a motion similar to thatof a wagon driven over a rocky road. This defeA oforchard-grass sod can be partially overcome by sowingclover and meadow-fescue with it; but the latter grass. FIG. 32—SOD OF ORCHARD-GRASS is little grown in this country, for reasons that will bementioned later. One of the most important advantages orchard-grass possesses is that it ripens exadtly with red clover,and is thus eminently adapted to sowing with that im-portant leguminous plant. It is a week to ten dayseariier than timothy; indeed, it is one of the earliestof our grasses to furnish green feed in spring, and istherefore a valuable constituent of pasture mixtures. It REDTOP AND ORCHARD-GRASS 159 is somewhat amusing to read the severe condemnationsof orchard-grass—and timothy, too, for that matter—inEnghsh books on grasses of the early part of tbe lastcentury, on account of its coarseness. This idea cropsout, to some extent, in American literature;
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, booksubjectgrasses, bookyear1916
