Rensselaer Union, Volume 11, Number 24, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 February 1879 — HOME, FARM AND GARDEN. [ARTICLE]

HOME, FARM AND GARDEN.

-* —The following are taken from the lowa Stale Rsgisler: , Some imagine that the perfection of farming consists wholly in aptneap to labor and strength of mujclo. President Welch says “a man’s character is modified by the food he eats and the life he leads.” An excellent farmer says that for every sheep he kept last year he sold, in lambs and wool, an .average of $5 worth per head. He said also that his sheep paid him better than anything grown on the farm, The highest order Of practical knowledge is absolutely necessary at every step for success in any enterprise. But this is far more necessary in agriculture, which has more diversified interests than any other industry. J. Burnham gives the Prairie Farmer an account of some experiments of his own, and of a neighbor with girdling fruit trees to cause abundant bearing Different modes were tried, some by simply cutting well through the bark, and others by cutting out a small ring of the* bark, a sixteenth of an inch in width. The first has proved most satisfactory, and limbs thus treated on trees long barren have given profuse crops. ' Tne work is done in spring. Cutting around the trunk o t the tree is preferred to treating branches only. Mr. B. recommends this practice for trees otherwise worthless from sterility. Sow clover. “It furnishes the most perfect protection to the soil during the fierce dry heats of summer. Being a constantly deciduous plant, its leaves are perpetually falling, and soon form a delicate covering for shade, and easily penetrated at all points by the air, which is the greatest carrier to the worn-out soil of those atmospheric elements that are to enrich it. In this way the clover plant not only contributes directly to the fertilizing of the soil by giving its own substance to it, but furnishes a protective covering to the entire ground, which encourages and stimulates those chemical processes by which the hungry and exhausted soil is recuperated from the vast supplies of nutriment that are held in the atmosphere. It becomes to the farmer the most valuable fertilizer in the world, as it imparts fertility to the entire soil.”