02 RuTA Baga culture. [Part I. 



Quickly fatted. Good if half fat. Capable of sup- 

 porting an immense burden of fat. Demanding but 

 liitle space for its accommodation ; and yet, if grain 

 and corn and milk are to be their principal food, dur- 

 ing their lives, they cannot multiply very fast ; because 

 many upon a farm cannot be kept to much profit. But, 

 if, by providing a sufficiency of Ruta Baga, a hundred 

 pigs could be raised upon a farm in a year, and car- 

 ried on till fatting time, they would be worth, when 

 ready to go into the fatting sty, fifteen dollars each. 

 This would be something worth attending to ; and the 

 farm must become rich from the manure. The Ruta 

 Baga, taken out of the heaps early in April, will keep 

 well and sound all the summer; and with a run in an 

 orchard, or in a grassy place, it will keep a good sort of 

 hog always in a very thriving, and esen fleshy state. 



134. This root, being called a turnip, is regarded as 

 a turnip, as a common turnip, than which nothing can 

 be much less resembling it. The common turnip is a 

 very poor thing. The poorest of all the roots of the 

 bulb kind, cultivated in the fields ; and the Ruta Baga, 

 all taken together, is, perhaps, the very best. It loses 

 none of its good qualities by being long kept, though 

 dry all the while. A neighbour of mine in Hampshire, 

 having saved a large piece of Ruta Baga for seed, and 

 having, after harvesting the seed, accidently thrown 

 some of the roots into his yard, saw his hogs eat these 

 old roots, which had borne the seed. He gave them 

 some more, and saw that they ate them greedil}'. He, 

 therefore, went and bought a whole drove, in number 

 about forty, of lean pigs, of a good large size, brought 

 them into his yard, carted in the roots of his seed Ruta 

 Baga, and, without having given the pigs a handful of 

 any other sort of food, sold out his pigs as fat porkers. 

 And, indeed, it is a fact well known, that sheep and 

 cattle, as well as hogs, will thrive upon this root after 

 it has borne seed, which is what, I believe, can be said 

 of no other root or plant. 



135, When we feed off our Ruta Baga in the fields, 

 in England, by sheep, there are small parts left by the 

 sheep : the shells which they have left after scooping 

 put the pulp of the bulb ; the tap-root ; and other little 



