Democratic Sentinel, Volume 1, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 December 1877 — AGRICULTURAL and domestic. [ARTICLE]

AGRICULTURAL and domestic.

Around the Farm. Decaying vegetable matter about the houses, around the walls and in the cellar are prolific causes of diseases in the farm-honse. 111-treatment of cows, getting them excited, and then feeding the milk to children, is a practice liable to be attended with fatal results. Bad ventilation, attended with impure air, causes catarrhal and skin diseases of onr animals, especially when obliged to breathe the impurities of decaying manure. Better ventilation of sleepingrooms is urged, and more oat-door exercise for the fanner’s wife. Young chickens frequently go blind in one or both eyes. Glycerine is ‘a sure remedy. One small drop applied to eaoh eye will soon cause the eyes to open, or soften the edges of the lids so as to admit of their being easily opened with the point of a penknife. —Pou Ury Bulletin. It is estimated that fifty head of poultry will make more than enough manure for an acre of land—7oo weight of guano being the usual quantity applied per acre, and poultry manure being even richer than guano in ammonia and fertilizing salts. No other stock will give an eqnal return in this way, and these figures demand careful attention from the large farmer. A Canadian writer in the columns of the Cultivator is making it appear that a farming family disposed to home industry might squeeze their sweetening out of the beet without any great waste. Grind the washed beets, boil down the juice and feed the pummace to cattle—that’s the short of it. Of course there will be no fine pastry pulverized sugar to serve with fruit produced by such a rude performance. Fertilizing Strawberries. When stable manure cannot be obtained, superphosphate of lime may be used to advantage, if it be pure. Five hundred pounds per acre will suffice, spread broadcast and harrowed in ; then sprinkle a little in each hole as the plants are set. ABhes are also a good fertilizer. Or, in place of ashes, muriate of potash will do as well. It contains 50 per cent, of pure potash, and is now quoted at $3 to 53.50 per 100 pounds, and less by the ton. The following formula is said to produce very large crops of strawberries : * ‘ One quart nitrate of potash, one quart glauber salts, and one quart sal soda,” all to be dissolved in water, one barrel f r three pounds of the mixture, which is enough for a bed forty or fifty feet square ; apply early in the season, from a wateringpot, several times till the fruit sets. — Exchange. I have increased the fertility of my land by feeding Bhorts, com meal, brewers’ sprouts, brewers’ grains, and beef scraps, and buying some hay. Then, in order to keep up, or rather increase, the fertility of my soil, I feed shorts to my milch cows, because they contain phosphate of lime, ammonia and potash. I also feed brewers’ grains, because the brewer has removed only the sugar from them, and I feed a little com meal. These are fed to make, in the first place, more milk; in the second place, better milk, and, in the third place, more and better manure, because, by feeding these, I am enabled to keep more stock and make more manure, and enrich my land bo that I can keep more stock, consume more shorts, more meal, more grains, more hay, and more manure. To this, I suppose, there is a limit, but I have not reached it yet.— Cor. New England Farmer.