Rensselaer Republican, Volume 15, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 January 1883 — FARM NOTES. [ARTICLE]

FARM NOTES.

Has an account of the crops, stock implements, grain, meat, etc., been taken yet? It is a good plan to know exactly how one stands at the beginning of the new year. - A “footnote” in the New York Trib une recommends to coal tar the wood work of a stall of a gnawing horse. Thorough saturation with kerosene is also said to produce a permanent cure. The basket willow will grow around the mill-ponds and along the margins of the water-courses. It is an article whieh is always salable, and should be made to take the place of the unsightly briars and bushes that often prove so troublesome in such places. An exchange gives the annexed recipe for colic in horses, which it claims is one of the best known, and is well worth preservation by horsemen: Laudanum, belladonna, sulph. ether chloroform; each two ounces; dose, half tablespoonful in a half pint of water. If fowls are fed more than they will eat up quickly they become too fat, and will ase laying. Give them as much as they will eat eagerly, and no more. Scalded meal, bran and mashed potatoes form an excellent meal for the morning feed. The feed of corn or other grain should be given at night A pure Italian bee should have three distinct yellow bands or rings across the lower part of the abdomen, and brigUh yellow hair over the body. The Albino bees are a strain of the Italians, having with bands and hair. The latter are the finest workers of the two, and are easier handled. The Scientific American is'quoted as saying that “copal varnish applied to the soles of shoes and repeated as it dries until the pores are .filled and the surface shines like pollished mahogany, will make soles waterproof and. last as long as the uppers.” One of the best things we have seen for farm boots, is an outer sole, or tap, of wood thoroughly dried, soaked in linseed oil and screwed to the bottom of the boot. It isn’t elegant, but it does keep the cold from “ strikeing through” tlte bottom of the boot Complaint has often been made that grapes grown in the vicinity of gas-works posses the disagreeable taste and odor of gas-tar and it has been supposed the fruit absorbed this volatile substance from the air. Recent investigations prove, however, that the odor and flavor of the grapes are due to the fact that the sap of the vine absorbs them from the soil, If disagreeable odors may thus find their way into the, grapes, why, by similar artificial process, may not grapes, andlndeed, other fruits, be possibly flavored to suit the taste, however varied and whimsical. An English leather horseshoe has been tried in Brooklyn which lasts a month longer than iron shoes made by blacksmiths. Their is a suspicion that blacksmiths use lead in the iron of which horseshoes are made. Put a pair of new shoes on a horse wih steel corks and drive the horse five miles and the corks will be worn down so the horse will slip on a wet pavement What it wants are corks made of the kind of steel burglars’ tools are made of, or' leather. If English leather is more tough than the blacksmith’s iron the leather should come in general ‘use ard let blacksmiths get poor and shoemakers get rich.