Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 January 1876 — How to Get Eggs in Winter. [ARTICLE]

How to Get Eggs in Winter.

We will not say that the farmer who leaves poultry to roost in the apple tree at the corner of the barn, and to pick up their living at the pigs’ trough and in the barnyard, may not occasionally get an egg in winter. But as a matter of fact there is on most farms a great dearth of eggs from November to March. With a warm shelter and suitable feed pullets that begin to lay in the fall will continue to lay through the winter. It is mainly a question of feed. The staple feed is Indian corn, especially in the West, because it is the most plentiful and the most convenient. It furnishes plenty of fat, and keeps up the heat of the fowls, but it is poor in albumen and the phosphates. They want a variety of grains and vegetables, and, to do their best, one feed aaily of warm cooked meal and vegetables. Most fanners have milk, and if this can be added it will be all they need. Butchers’ scrap cake is good, and may safely be kept in the poultry-yard where the fowls can help themselves at pleasure. Boiled potatoes or turnips, mashed and mixed with Indian-meal, make an excellent feed for laying hens. Fowls are particularly fond of cabbages and turnips at all stages of their growth, and eat them raw greedily every day if they ctp get them. We have found so good results from feeding cabbages to laying hens that we always lay in a large supply for the winter. Refuse from the butchers, and offal from the fish-market, also furnish good material for making eggs. These are accessible to most villagers, and can be had at small cost. A hen is only a machine for producing eggs. If you want the finished product you must put the raw material into the "hopper. It should not te forgotten that there is a liberal grinding going on in the gizzard, and. the laying bird should have free access to gravel with sharp grit, broken oyster and clam shells, which assist in reducing the grains and forming egg-shells. With a plentiful supply of egg-producing food hens will lay well in winter when eggs bring the highest price.— American Agricultural. A New York firm is manufacturing battle-field relics to sell to Centennial greenhorns.

In nothing has the advance of practical science been more clearly evidenced than in the extent to which substances formerly wasted and lost are now reclaimed and made to constitute an important element in the profits of the manufacturer. One of these applications consists in the recovery of the soap-suds from the washings of wool in woolen factories. These were formerly allowed to run down the sewers and into the streams, to the great pollution of the layer; but in Bradfora, in England, they are now run from the wash-ing-bowls into vats, and there treated with sulphuric acid. The fats rise to the surface in a mass of grease a foot or more in thickness, which is carefully collected and treated in various ways, mostly by distillation. The products are grease, used for lubricating the cogs of drivingwheels in the mills; oleic acid, which is worth about $l6O per ton, and used as a substitute for olive oil; stearin, worth S4OO per ton, etc. It is said that some large mill-owners are now paid from $2,500 to $5,000 a year for these suds, which a few years ago were allowed to run to waste.— N. Y. Tribune. In a recent exploration in New Guineas boa-constrictor fifteen feet three inches long was shot, having a protuberance in his body fourteen and a half inches in diameter, which, when cut open, proved to be the body of a whole kangaroo only partially digested. Personal.— W. J. McElroy.— I “As a general family remedy for Dyspepsia, Torpid Liver, Constipation, etc., I hardly ever use anything else but SIMMONS’ LIVER REGULATOR, and have never been disappointed in effect produced; it seems to be almost a perfect cure for all diseases of the stomach and bowels."