Knoxville Journal

Clover as a Shade to the Soil.

Of all grasses permissible in an orchard clover is the least objectionable and most beneficial, particularly as a shade. An enthusiastic agricultural writer argues that there is no other plant of so much value to farmers as this. "It furnishes the most perfect protection to the soil during the fierce, dry heats of the summer. Being a constantly deciduous plant its leaves are perpetually falling and soon form a delicate covering for shade, and easily penetrated at all points by the air, which is the great carrier to the worn-out soil of those atmospheric elements that are to enrich it. In this way the clover plant not only contributes directly to the fertilizing of the soil by giving its own substance to it but it furnishes a protective covering to the entire ground, which encourages and stimulates those chemical processes by which the hungry and exhausted soil is recuperated from the vast supplies of nutriment that are held in the atmosphere. It becomes to the farmer the most valuable fertilizer in the world, as it imparts fertility to the entire soil." It should be added, by way of caution, that very two or three years it should be plowed under and left for a year to rot in the soil; otherwise the ground may get too sod-bound, which is almost invariably injurious to fruit trees.-N. Y. Independent.