wpeas are grown for their pods to ripen, the seeds should be
planted in rows about a yard apart. From two to three pecks of seeds to
an acre should be sufficient. The growing plants should be cultivated
two or three times with a good cultivator. Cowpeas were formerly
gathered by hand, but such a method is of course slow and expensive.
Pickers are now commonly used.

Some farmers use the cowpea crop only as a soil-enricher. Hence they
neither gather the seeds nor cut the hay, but plow the whole crop into
the soil. There is an average of about forty-seven pounds of nitrogen in
each ton of cowpea vines. Most of this valuable nitrogen is drawn by the
plants from the air. This amount of nitrogen is equal to that contained
in 9500 pounds of stable manure. In addition each ton of cowpea vines
contains ten pounds of phosphoric acid and twenty-nine pounds of potash.

There is danger in plowing into the soil at one time any bountiful green
crop like cowpeas. As already explained on page 10, a process
called capillarity enables moisture to rise in the soil as plants need
it. Now if a heavy cowpea crop or any other similar crop be at one
plowing turned into the soil, the soil particles will be so separated as
to destroy capillarity. Too much vegetation turned under at once may
also, if the weather be warm, cause fermentation to set in and "sour the
land." Both of these troubles may be avoided by cutting up the vines
with a disk harrow or other implement before covering them.

The custom of planting cowpeas between the rows at the last working of
corn is a good one, and wherever the climate permits this custom should
be followed.

=Vetches.= The vetches have been rapidly growing in favor for some
years. Stock eat vetch hay greedily, and this hay increases the flow of
milk in dairy animals and helps to keep animals fat and sleek. Only two
species of vetch are widely grown. These are the tare, or spring vetch,
and the winter, or hairy, vetch. Spring vetch is grown in comparatively
few sections of our country. It is, however, grown widely in England and
northern continental Europe. What we say here will be confined to hairy
vetch.

After a soil has been supplied with the germs needed by this plant, the
hairy vetch is productive on many different kinds of soil. The plant is
most vigorous on fertile loams. By good tillage and proper fertilization
it may be forced to grow rather bountifully on poor sandy and clay
loams. Acid or wet s