536 AGRICULTURAL REPORT. 
wholly of earth, or earth and cement, and the house never without 
boxes of dry ashes, and, if possible, a stream of running water or troughs 
regularly filled with fresh water daily. 
At leastonce a week the whole of the surface of the yard should be turned 
over or loosened with the tines of a heavy manure-fork, so that 
everything that would emit unhealthy odors may be covered or incor- 
porated with the deodorizing particles of the earth ; or, still better, turn 
over a portion each day, so that the hens can have a little new space 
where they can daily find fresh gravel and other substances veedfal for 
health, Every month the whole surface, to the depth of three inches, 
should be removed, and its place supplied with fresh earth from outside. 
Ten fowls thus cared for will furnish ample manuring material for a 
small garden, while fifty will suffice to manure well half an acre. 
Fowls overfat, or lean, seldom lay. Food that will keep them in the 
best working trim, as is said of an ox or horse, is the best; and they 
should be fed at regular hours with inexorable precision, say with a 
ground mixture of oats, buckwheat, barley and corn, in the morning, 
and whole corn and buckwheat at night, for three days in succession, 
and then a mixture of Indian meal one part, and boiled potatoes three 
parts for the fourth day, and so on through the year. With this, if the 
hens are shut up, they should be fed with some kind of meat, and green 
food, as grass, cabbage-leaves, beet-tops, &c., in season; and, to secure 
the greatest return, fresh oyster shells (pounded) each day in abundance. 
In winter the house must be kept closed, unless for an hour or two in 
the middle of a warm day. 
Hens should have a separate place in or about the poultry-house, for 
sitting purposes, as whenever one commences her incubation there is 
always an inclination among the others in the same apartment to dis- 
turb her and lay in the same nest. Hens are inclined to.sit where they 
have laid, and, if removed, will sometimes leave the newly-made nest. 
Before the eggs are put under the hen every particle of old straw should 
be removed, the nest box thoroughly cleaned, fresh hay substituted, and 
a little sulphur sprinkled in it; twelve eggs for the largest hens and 
nine for the smallest, will be sufficient. After the incubation has com- 
menced never touch the hen or the eggs; nor, what is worse, disturb 
the nest. Itis as bad as digging up a kernel of corn every day to see 
ifithas sprouted. Place food where it will be accessible, give free range, 
keep other fowls and marauding animals away, and let her and her eggs 
and nest alone. The chickens should appear the twenty-first day, and 
the mother knows best when to abandon her nest with her young brood. 
The best food for young chickens is a mixture of hard-boiled egg and 
coarse-ground corn meal; or, at the outset, dry bread reduced to a proper 
form by being run through a coffee-mill. They should be fed sparingly 
every two hours, and kept dry and warm in cold weather. 
Well-protected and carefully-managed hens have but few ailments; even 
the gapes, the most fatal disease among young chickens, is seldom known 
where the young are brooded on a dry surface and are not permitted to 
wander where they would be exposed and overcome by the coid, or by 
wet grass. Vermin must be exterminated by washing the rooms with 
lime water. 
In raising turkeys they should be proportioned about ten or twelve 
hens to one cock. Tosave the trouble of watching them while seeking 
nests, prepare a yard of one-eighth of an acre for every fifteen birds, 
wherein nothing else is allowed to go. The best arrangement for a nestis 
small houses, about three feet by three, gable-shaped, and three feet high 
in the center. Nests should be scattered about the yard, and, if con- 
