Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 December 1884 — FARM NOTES. [ARTICLE]

FARM NOTES.

Sour milk, whey, and buttermilk arc excellent liquids for mixing with the soft food of poultry. A sick horse, that cannot be induced to lie dpwn in any other way, will often take to a bed of clean, bright straw. Value of Apple Pomace.— As a fertilizer my experience is that pomace is only about as valuable as peat muck, and not good for much until it has had the action of the frost and the atmosphere to neutralize the acid it contains. I And it a good absorbent to put into the hog pen or the barn cellar after the acid is out, and it is useful to spread on low grass lands. My stock eat pomace ; and it does not hurt them. My experience is that pomace is better than apples for producing milk.— lsrael Putnam, Middlesex County, Massachusetts. A writer in the New England Homestead, finding that the cut-worm* destroyed his tobacco plants as fast as he set them, procured a basketful of chestnut leaves which were young and tender, and, after steeping them in water which contained one tablespoonful of Paris green to each gallon of water, he placed a leaf over the spot where the plants were to be set. The Worms ate holes in the leaves and lay in clusters dead, or so stupid that they did no further harm to the plants, which were afterward set out and a fine crop was harvested. The New York Times says one of the most serious obstacles to successful dairying is wet pastures.* Land that is saturated with water produces unwholesome herbage, the grass is rank | and sour, and sometimes the herbage consists wholly of sedges and bther ■ coarse plants that are not easily digestible. Such food cannot produce good milk, and the milk made from such food will not make good cheese oi butter. But very often the coarse, rani food produces disease in the cows. Thu is more especially the case with year lings and young cattle whose digestive powers are not fully matured. Probably more than half oi all the webds are first brought to our farms ii the grass seed. Suppose we were givei a bushel of clove? or timothy seed con taining only twenty grains of ripple oi wild caiTot or daisy; how much bettei to burn it than to sow and go over fchi fields time after time to pull out th< weeds? It would cost more than tei times the price of the seed to get th< last of these plants out. It is far bette to refuse entirely those seeds “with onj a few weed seeds,” and pav a roum price for those entirely free from them and then* on seeding down land w should sow plenty of seed, so as to hay the surface fully occupied with the d« sired crop.— New York Tribune.