Rensselaer Republican, Volume 14, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 November 1881 — Farm and Workshop Notes. [ARTICLE]

Farm and Workshop Notes.

The Connetlcut Valley was.formerly the great broomcorn region of the country. Now the corn is chiefly raised < n the fertile prairies of the West, aud Chicago is the principal market. Steers weighing from 1,200 to 1,700 pounds lest suit the British butchers, as they can cutup tbe carcasses of such most economically for their customers, and tbe sizes of the j ieces are more acceptable toXhem. Dr. Nichols, in the Juornal of Chemistry, tells just how to reduce nones with ashes for fertilizing purposes. He says: “Break 100 pounds of bones into small fragments and pack them in a tight cask or box w th 100 pounds of good wood ashes which have been previously mixed with twenty-five pounds oi dry, water-slacked lime and twelve pounds of powdered sal soda. Twenty gallons of water will saturate the mass, and more may be added as required. In two or three weeks the bones will be soft enough to turn out on the barn floor and be mixed with two buthels of good soil.” Colonel Thomas Fitch, of New London, Conn., hazards the opinion in a letter to the Boston Traveller that more than half the cows recorded in the “gilt-edged register” of the American Jersey Cattle Club “will not give on an average ten quarts of milk daily, or make one pound of butter per day for three months,” and, referring t J the recent sale of the bull Polonius for $4,500, and “a more ordinary looking thirteen year old cow at $3,000,” of “the Alpbea craze strain of blood,” he uses this emphatic exhortation: “Down with such wild cat theories, and give us good blood at fair prices and less humbug.”