Rensselaer Union, Volume 12, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 September 1879 — HOME, FARM AND GARDEN. [ARTICLE]

HOME, FARM AND GARDEN.

—To clean stair rods, use woolen cloth wet with water and dipped in sifted coal ashes. Afterwards rub with a dry cloth. —Ripe tomato pickles are thus prepared: Peel firm ripe tomatoes; slice them in halves, then pack in a jar with alternate layers of sugar. Use three pounds to 9 peck of tomatoes, and spice to taste. Invert a plate over the top, and set away for a month. They will make their own vinegar, and a first-class article at that. —Chili sauce is made thus: Four quarts tomatoes, four, large onions, six peppers, six cups of vinegar, six tablespoonfuls of sugar, then a tablespoonful of salt, oue tablespoonful each of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and ginger. First take the skins from the tomatoes, peel the onions and then chop tine, add all other ingredients aud boil about twenty minutes, and bottle while hot. —String beans can be prepared for winter use in this manner: String the beans, but do not break them. Put them on the fire with cold water and allow them to come to a boil. Take them off, pat them in a market) basket and let them drain until the next day. Make a brine of the water in which they were boiled strong enough to bear an egg. Tie tbe leaves in a muslin bag, put them ia a jar and pour the brine over them. Put a weight on and set them away. When used, change the water in which they were boiled; and if not used until late in winter soak them over night —To make corn porridge, takeyßkng corn, and out the grains from the cob. Measure it and to each heaping pint of corn allow not quite a quart of milk. Put the oorn and milk into a pot, stir them well together, and boil them till the corn is perfectly soft Then add some bits of fresh butter dredged with flour, and let it boil five minutes longer. Stir in at the last some beaten yelk of egg, and in three minutes remove it from the fire. Take up the porridge, send it to the table hot, and stir some fresh butter into it You may add sugar and nutmeg. —This is the way to put up cucumbers to have them remain firm without using poison to accomplish it: Wash your cucumbers, taken fresh from the vine, in clear, cold water; put them in a porcelain kettle, with just sufficient water to cover them, and add sufficient salt to season the encumbers. Let them remain on tbe stove till hot, but not boil; then take them Ont and drain till perfectly dry. Put them in bottles, and cover them with boiling vinegar of the best quality, to which has been added some red pepper, some mustard seed, a little horseradish, and sugar just to suit the taste. Cucumbers prepared in this way, if good vinegar is used, will keep a whole year if properly sealed up.— Cincinnati Times. —The old system of draining by means of narrow lands or ridges, and dead furrows between them for the purpose of carrying off the water, haa become obsolete. But it is a question if the method is not too useful to be abandoned. The use of the mower and reaper has tended to favor the practice of level plowing, but where the soil is wet and is not nnderdrained this is a manifest disadvantage, and this without any sufficient corresponding benefit The dead farrows may be made so regular in slope as to admit of the passage of a mower over them without trouble, and they will serve to carry off surface water, dry the soil, and prevent the heaving ont of grain or grass during the winter. In plowing wet lands for wheat or rye this consideration may be worth notice and thought— N. Y. Times. A Pulaski boy recently swallowed a penknife. Although not quite ont of danger, he finds some consolation in the fact that the knife belonged to another boy.— Fulton (N. Y.) Tunes.

A CONTEMPORARY OSkS: “ HOW Shall women carry their panes to frustrate the thieve*?” Why, carry them empty. Nothing frustrates a thief more than to snateh a woman’s pane, after following her a half mile, and then find that it oontaiqp nothing bat a recipe for 3ioed peaches ana a faded photograph her grandmother. —Norristown Herald. - "■W' “ Is there any opening here for an intaUeotaal writer?” asked a seedy, red-noeed individual of an editor. “Yes, my friend,” replied the man of quills; “a considerate carpenter, foreseeing your visit, left an opening for yon; torn the knob to the right!”