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Show MAKE PASTURES A FEATURE Variety of Grasses Should Be Selected to Conform to Soil Conditions Use a Little Thought We often hear people say that they believe dairying might do pretty well in certain neighborhoods if they only had pastures. The idea these people intend to convey is generally that all the land Is cropped and that there is no low land too wet or high land too rough to crop. In other words, these good people do not know what a pasture pas-ture is. They have misinterpreted the Lord's intentions when he made land too boggy or too hilly for cultivation. An iaeal pasture should contain a number of grasses and clovers so that in its turn some one of those grasses or clovers is coming to its best each week during the pasture season, writes Ben R. Eldridge in Utah Farmer. The variety of grasses planted in a pasture should also be selected so that if there is a variety of soils or of soil conditions condi-tions in the pasture there will be some variety of grass especially adapted to each variety or condition of the soil. Some grasses, for instance, provide excellent feed in the spring. They lie dormant in the warmer weather of summer and make another very excellent excel-lent growth in the fall, and these grasses are excellent in their way, but should be planted with other varieties that are dought resistant and grow fairly well during midsummer. Some grasses do well on well-drained well-drained soil; others require low land, where the soil is continually damp and where the surface water is at a shallow shal-low depth below the ground level. Laying Lay-ing off permanent pastures the ground should be built up; that is, well fertilized, ferti-lized, laid oft if it is to be irrigated so that the greatest amount of good can be gained when water is applied. Then, if a proper variety of grasses is selected, a sod can be produced that will stand a wonderful amount of tramping and for many years furnish feed for several animals to the acre during four to five months of the year. That is what a pasture really is. Our swamp lands and our rocky hillsides are misnamed, when we call them "pastures." I don't think it's much to the credit of some of us who call places pastures that have been used for forty years and never known the planting of a single seed from the hand of the owner. own-er. We can have most excellent pastures pas-tures if we only use a little thought and make them. A few acres of good, well-made pasture pas-ture will furnish more and better feeding feed-ing than can be gathered from a quarter quar-ter section of much of the ground that we dignify in its unbroken state by the name of "pasture." There are many places where there Is a fair natural sod, but is very, seldom those places cannot be immensely improved by re-enforcing the native grasses by a few seasonable seedings of domestic grasses. Why leave these things all to the Lord? He has done a great deal for us. Let us do our share and make some pastures. |