Democratic Sentinel, Volume 3, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 October 1879 — FARM NOTES. [ARTICLE]

FARM NOTES.

Store potatoes in a dark, cool place, and in shallow bins. A better understanding is needed between farmers and millers. Take the topmost ear of corn for seed, and select it from those stalks which bear the greatest number of ears. If strawberry beds are to be protected this winter, it is of importance that the material used should not cover the soil with seeds. Probably straw or even the sheaves and small stalks of corn are as good as any thing that can be used. Mr. Vick says that every farmer should have a supply of willows for binding bundles of trees. For binding cornstalks, straw and for many other purposes, they will be found of great value when their utility is once known. The hens at Rural Grounds are all confined in picket inclosures—ten to an area of about thirty feet square. We give a teaspoonful of ground bone or bone flour every two or three days mixed in their food. We have never yet found a thin-shelled egg.— Rural New Yorker.

Hebe agriculture is pulling the nation out of the Slough of Despond and all its financial difficulties; in England a revival in manufactures is promising to help farmers a little and the country a good deal. We are a nation of “farmers ; England a nation of mechanics and shop-keepers. The present prospects are that we shall have a surplus of from 160,000,000 to 175,000,000 bushels of wheat for exportation; and that the wheat-import-ing countries in Europe will require from 280,000,000 to 300,000,000 bushels, so that there is a fair margin for the surplus products of other nations also. Pick grapes when fully ripe and during pleasant weather. Leave them under cover for a week or so until dry. Pack in shallow boxes, six inches or less in depth, a foot long. Cut out all imperfect, decayed, dry or green berries. Pack as closely as possible without injuring them, and then nail on the covers. Then they should be placed in a cool, dry room. For hedges we know of no more ornamental and effectual plant than the Japan Quince. Choose the white, rose and deep-red for colors. This will bear pruning to any desired extent while its leaves are of the greenest and firmest of textures. In early spring, no other hedge would equal it in beauty. It is very hardy, and, though net an evergreen, of course, its bare blanches in winter can scarcely look more dreary than the lifeless-brown color of Arborvitaes. Growing Strawberries in Winter. —Strong plants from runners that appeared early in the summer, and which are now in six or seven-inch pots, can readily be made to fruit in any greenhouse or warm plant-room, where they can get plenty of sun. Keep the plants in an open shed, where they will be exposed to the frost and can still be kept dry, unfit the latter part of December; then they should be thawed out, the upper two inches of the soil scraped off and replaced with well-rotted manure, and henceforward treated as growing plants.

Poultry Vermin.—There are many recipes for driving vermin away from poultry and houses. The inventors of these are shrewd ; they know that people are naturally indolent in both body and mind; that they never guard against invasion, but wait till the enemy is upon them, and then buy up all the new-fangled nostrums, kill all the lice and half-kill the hens and chickens, and at once begin to do some tall crowing. All poultry vermin delight in moist or damp places; in fact they can’t live anywhere else. That’s the principle. Now what does it suggest: Why, the suggestion is obvious; don’t have any damp places, and that means a dry chickenhouse, a dry earth floor to it, a dry roof, no manure allowed to accumulate on the floor or under the perches, because that is always damp, and absorbs dampness from the air. Build two chicken houses—one in a low, damp, ill-ventilated place, the other on a high, dry, sunny, airy spot, and let your flock choose; the most miserable old hen “ that ever was” knows better what she wants than the most dignified, dandyish, intellectually civilized poultry-fancierthat thehen-fe-verhas ever produced. Remember, a wa-ter-tight house, a ground or sandy floor, plenty of sunlight and fresh air, and your children will have to go to college to learn the entymology of the henhouse, instead of brushing vermin off of every egg they bring to the housekeeper.—Rural New Yorker.