Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 39, Number 88, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 July 1907 — FARM AND FARDEN [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

FARM AND FARDEN

The fanner who has no time to read the papers will have plenty of time later—in the poor house. , All breeding animals should have a laxative ration before the young are born, and especially so when on dry feed. You need not expect full returns at the egg bucket from hens that roost In trees. Good comfortable houses pay this cost in one year. The farmers of eastern Washington, eastern Oregon and northern Idaho have formed an organization to control the price of grain and will build their own warehouses. There was a slight -decrease last year In British arable land and a decrease In grass land. Eighty-seven per cent of all The agricultural land. In England is occupied by tenants. Piles in swine may.be relieved by giving one or two tablespoonfuls of sulphur to each bog afflicted until improvement Is noted and then every other day until cure Is effected. Knock out fleas by scattering fine, fresh powdered lime over their haunts; or kerosene; or Persian Insect, powder. (Jive ’em plenty. But do not have any dusty spots under a floor, or elsewhere, where they can breed and multiply. Dehorning cattle is no doubt cruel, at the time of operation, but those who favor It maintain that cattle which have been deprived of their horns eat out of the same trough without doing injury to one another, and greater market!

Recipe for making harness oil: Take two quarts of fish-oil, two pounds of mutton tallow, one pint of castor oil, one-quarter pound of ivory black, onehalf pound of beeswax, four ounces of resin, one ounce of Burgundy pitch. Put these Ingredients into an iron kettle, place over a slow fire; boil and stir for half an hour. Let settle for fifteen minutes, and then pour off all but the sediment into another vessel. Use cold. After oiling the harness, wipe it off with a dry rag. Neatsfoot oil will answer If fish-oil is not obtainable.

2,000 Pallets la One House. Professor Gowell, of the Maine experiment station, on his farm, kept 2,000 pullets in one house, on an area of 400x200 feet, or a little over two acres. Each fowl had four feet space of house room, which would naturally be considered rather limited quarters, and was only made possible by having them In large floCks and a curtain-front house. These pullets laid from GOO to 900 eggs per day during December and January. If 2,000 laying hens can, as has beep demonstrated, be successfully kept on about two acres of land, then five acres are capable of supporting a complete plant for 2,000 hens and growing stock to renew the layers, aud such a plant, with proper management, should pay from $2,000 to $5,000 per annum net profit. It is only necessary that the man have the ability.

Cutworms. As the cutworm seems to work mostly during nights that are cool, ceasing to do much harm after the nights become warm, many methods for destroying them have been suggested. It has long been known that sod land, or land covered with growth that has not been recently disturbed, contains more cutworms than land that has previously been cultivated and kept clean, as the moth deposits her eggs where Instinct prompts her to provide an abundance of food, the moths working from June until October In accumulations of rubbish or on fields covered with beavy »od, but not in the ground, as the young worms feed on vegetation, going down Into the ground at the approach of winter, where they remain to begin work early In the spring, reaching maturity In a abort time. An excellent plan Is to plow the ground, leaving the land rough, late In tbe season, which turns many worms to the .surface, where they are destroyed by the alternate thawing and freezing of the ground, especially If the soil is damp. Early In the spring, Just before the frost leaves, the ground should be plowed again, which will cause the destruction of more of them. In both cases the birds destroy a large number. During the atuhmer It wIH be of advantage to keep the ground clear of weeds or heaps of refuse, and do,not destroy the moles, as they subsist on cutworms. If given an opportunity to do so, the mole will prove Itself to be one of the most useful friends of the farmer. Kltrogsa from Creca.pafa, Among the advantages gained with green crops are the accumulation of nitrogen In the soli, the rendering soluble at unavailable mineral matter, the

protection of- j tbe--soil with covered crops, the addition of large ainonnts of humus-forming material to the land. The only disadvantage is the loss of the land, upon Which a marketable crop can be grown during the year, ita value depending upon the kind of crop and tJfi? capacity of the soil. Among the other green crops that are seldom used may be mentioned corn, millet, turnips, rape, sorghum, soy beans, eta, but the crimson clover and cow pea crops are preferred. It Is claimed that turnips, by reason of their deep, penetrating roots, appropriate a large proportion of the mineral elements of the subsoil, which are brought to the surface when they are plowed under, thus following cow peas as an aid, increasing the amount of available mineral matter, especially phosphates, but tb« nitrogen from the cow peas is a cleai gain to the farmer, being derived from the atmosphere, while the mineral matter is taken from the lower portion! of the lands and brought within hii l eac-h. Any method, however, that ren ders the plant foods in the soil mori -available should be adopted. Greer foods perform valuable service in as slating to increase the supply of humus which enables the soil to retain mols ture.

Feeding- Prickly Pear to Stock. * A bulletin by tha United States I)j partment of Agriculture, Bureau o; Animal Industries, contains notes or the forms of prickly pear and glvei the results of feeding tests with cow» and steers. The method of feeding thii plant was that commonly employed up on ranches in Southern Tex&s, when the experiments were conducted. In tests with two cows prickly pea) compared with sorghum hay. Th« complete data, including weather ob serrations, are reported. “A full rough age ration of pear with a constant grain ration appears to yield fully ai good results as a full roughage ratloi of sorghum hay. The records are r<*illj a little more favorable to the pear ration.” The prickly pear ration, includr ing twelve pounds t>f rice bran and three pounds of cottonseed meal, cost 13.05 cents per cow dally. This allowed for the labor and gasoline required io singeing the cactus. It Is stated that prickly pear has been fed to a dairj herd for two to four months each yeai for six or eight years with no complaint from customers which could lr any way be attributed to pear feeding. A lot of twenty-seven steers was kept in a four-acre feeding lot and fed chopped prickly pear with cottonseed meal. The largest and most woody plants available were selected, chopped without singeing, and fed in troughs early in the morning and about the middle of the afternoon. The cottonseed meal was sprinkled on the chopped prickly pear. The average dally gain in the 105 days of the test was 1.75 pounds per head, 55.03 pounds of prickly pear and 2.5 pounds of cottonseed meal, at a total cost of 3.48 cents, being required per pound of gain. When shipped to market the average shrinkage per steer was 88.5 pounds.