Hazel Garson, age 8, of Danville, I11., for her question:
WHEN CAN YOU PLANT MILLET?
Many kinds of grain and hay grasses are called millet. The planting season for millet varies with the location. The grain can be planted as early as May and as late as August.
Most varieties of millet are sensitive to cold. They should not be planted until the sun has thoroughly warmed the ground.
Rich, loamy soils are best. The soil is prepared for millet as it is for other grasses.
In Canada and the United States, farmers grow various kinds of millet for hay, for enriching the soil and for producing seed. In parts of Europe and Asia, millet is grown for human food. In India, farmers plant 40 million acres with millet each year to produce grain and flour. In Japan, 35 million bushels of millet seed are ground into flour each year.
Farmers in the United States usually grow foxtail millet. There are several varieties of foxtail millet, but all have thick, rounded flower heads at the top of slender stems.
In Hungarian millet, a variety of foxtail millet, these spikes are purple.
Foxtail millet grows chiefly in Kansas, Missouri, Texas and neighboring states. Foxtail millet makes the best hay when the grass is cut just after the flowers reach full bloom.
Broomcorn millet, which grows in Europe, is also widely raised in North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and Colorado. It has loose, bushy flower heads that look somewhat like small brush brooms. Farmers use varieties of broomcorn for seed rather than for hay.
Barnyard millet is a cultivated form of the weed called barnyard grass. Farmers grow it chiefly as hay.
A little millet hay makes satisfactory feed for farm animals, if it is not used continuously. Ripe millet seeds are a good food for poultry and birds. Crushed millet seeds can be fed to livestock. But no millet hay or seed is fed to horses.
Although people in many parts of the world use millet as a feed, it is grown in the United States chiefly to feed cattle.
Insects and diseases do not usually attack millet.
Hungarian millet may yield two to three tons per acre within 50 or 80 days after the seeds have been planted.
You pronounce the grain "mill et." A famous French painter has the same name, but his is pronounced "Mee lay."
Jean Francois Millet painted one of the world's most famous pictures: a canvas called "The Man with the Hoe."
Millet worked largely in dark, muddy colors. He painted figures of farmers and workers in the fields as symbols rather than as individuals. Millet is seen today by many as a traditionalist whose handling of his themes seems sentimental.
Millet lived from 1814 until 1875.