1908 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



1273 



feel equ.il to it all! Mornings I feel something as an engine 

 must wlien pres ure of steam raises the safety-valve, only I can 

 vent my sliengtti by pushing the woik, and woik seems to me 

 now like play. It is a delightful pastime." Few women work 

 as hard as this one does. An old report from her tells a different 

 story. Others who will live moresimply and naturally can attain 

 to this perfect degree of health which makes work a pastime and 

 life a joy. 



HIGH-PRESSURE 

 GARDENING 



By A. I. Root 



ALFALFA AND LIME. 



Mr. Willis O. Wing, the great alfalfa king of 

 Ohio, tells us in the Ohio Farmer that he has 

 made a wonderful discovery in regard to ?.lfalfa. 

 This discovery is that alfalfa needs lime — must 

 have lime in the soil where it grows to perfec- 

 tion, and it wants more lime than any of the oth- 

 er clovers unless it is sweet clover. In fact, alfal- 

 fa and sweet clover grow most luxuriantly on soils 

 that have enough lime or other alkali to kill out 

 ordinary plants and other clovers. Your ground 

 needs to be well underdrained for alfalfa or any 

 thing else, and then it should be fertile. Any 

 kind of manure suits the plant. But the under- 

 draining and manure are not all. The main 

 thing is lime. Use lime at the rate of even six 

 tons to the acre, either burned or unburned, and 

 then you can grow alfalfa anywhere; and you 

 ought to get a ton of alfalfa hay for every ton of 

 lime you put on the land; and after you once get 

 the alfalfa started it is good for the rest of your 

 lifetime — that is, with ordinary care. This mat- 

 ter interests bee-keepers particularly, because the 

 same thing applies to sweet clover. Just as soon 

 as I read it I remembered seeing sweet clover 

 growing with such wonderful exuberance on the 

 alkali soils around Salt Lake City, and I have 

 repeatedly told you, as you may remember, that, 

 after sweet clover has got a foothold, it sweetens 

 the soil so it will grow any thing else. Both 

 Prof. Thorneand Green, of the Ohio Experiment 

 Station, said to me just a few days ago that the 

 farmers of the world need to wake up to the fact 

 that sweet clover will grow on ground too poor 

 for any other plant; and not only that, sweet 

 clover has the wonderful property of making 

 poor worthless land available for any other crop. 

 You may remember my telling about getting a 

 fine crop of potatoes on hard yellow clay, such 

 as is thrown out by the side of the railroad, where 

 they made a twelve-foot cut. Sweet clover got 

 in on this heap of poor yellow subsoil clay ; and 

 after it had grown there for several years I plow- 

 ed it under and planted my potatoes ; and yet 

 there are some people even now who talk about 

 sweet clover being a "noxious weed." Read 

 the following extract from the article referred to: 



"How much lime.'" "One hundred pounds to the square 

 rod; that is little enough," I replied. The man hesitated at 

 that, and balked just a little. One hundred pounds to the square 

 rod is eight tons to the acre. He put on six tons. He inoculat- 

 ed the soil with other soil from a good alfalfa-field. He sowed 

 alfalfa. He got six tons to the acre the next year, and all his 

 neighbors came to see the miracle that had been worked. That 

 lime cost the man about $12 per acre. His six tons of alfalfa 

 hay were worth to him at least $100 to feed his cows, so it paid 

 him immensely, did it not f 



Poultry 

 Department 



A POULTRY-HOUSE ENTIRELY OF CLOTH ; POUL- 

 TRY-HOUSES IN GENERAL, ESPECIALLY FOR 

 FLORIDA AND OTHER WARM CLIMATES. 



You know I have been for some time keeping 

 poultry in Florida, without any house or struc- 

 ture of any kind, and I claimed that none was 

 needed. However, when I came to separating 

 my cockerels from the pullets I found it was a 

 difficult matter to climb into the pine-trees and 

 get them off from the roost. Besides, there 

 needs to be some sort of shelter to keep your 

 grain and other feed dry ; and it is rather desir- 

 able, also, to have the nests where they will not 

 be soaked by rain. To get the best price for our 

 eggs we want them clean and bright; and the 

 only way to do this is to have nice dry nests under 

 some sort of shelter, and gather the eggs once a 

 day or oftener. There are times, also, even in 

 Florida, when the fowls would get under some 

 kind of shelter if they could find it. While 

 considering all of these matters lately, I have 

 wondered a good many times if some sort of 

 cloth tent would not answer every purpose: 

 Perhaps some more substantial roof would need 

 to be over the feed-bin. The whole poultry- 

 world is now pretty well agreed on the cloth 

 front or muslin curtain on account of ventilation. 



Well, after having all of these things in mind 

 for some time past, you can understand with 

 what avidity my eye caught on the following, 

 which I clipped from the Rural Ne-i.v -Yorker. 

 In fact, I read the article over and over again. 

 Here is the clipping: 



Some readers of the Rural may remember that last winter the 

 experiment was tried at Storrs College of keeping White Leg- 

 horns in a tent, such as can be bought from the Chicago mail- 

 order houses for $6.00. August 25 I was at Storrs, and saw those 

 same birds still living in the same tent, a handsome cock and 

 eight hens, and, so far as I could see, not the tip of a comb on 

 any one of them had been touched by frost. I inquired as to the 

 egg production, and was told that the eight pullets had laid from 

 five to six eggs a day, and sometimes eight. I looked in the 

 tent at about 3 o'clock, and there were six eggs in the nest then. 

 The birds are not confined to the tent, but have the full run of a 

 grassy yard. Beef-scraps and a dry mash which is partly of cut 

 clover are kept by them all the time. This would seem to be a 

 wide departure from the old way of " extra-warm houses to make 

 Leghorns profitable;" but it is in seeming only, for it was stated 

 that " it was warmer last winter inside that tent than in any 

 poultry-house on the place." The air was pure, the ventilation 

 perfect. We had a temperature last winter of 4" below zero on 

 several mornings; and that none of these Leghorns had their 

 combs frozen was almost incredible. The only furniture in the 

 tent, aside from the feed-boxes and drinking-fountain, was a 

 large box about two feet high, on the flat top of which the birds 

 roosted, no perch being provided. 



After reading it I went and got Montgomery 

 Ward & Co. 's catalog, and found that they ad- 

 vertise a tent made of 8-oz. duck, 7x7 ft. inside, 

 3 ft. high at the eaves and 7 ft. to the ridgepole, 

 which is probably the tent alluded to in the item 

 above. I wonder if we are to understand from 

 the Rural that only eight hens and a rooster kept 

 there inside all last winter better than in any oth- 

 er poultry-house on the place. If this is true, 

 the tent was probably closed up very tight — that 

 is, there were no openings to permit a draft. 

 The nine fowls warmed all the air inside, and 

 the gradual change of the air, without any draft 

 of air, gave abundant ventilation. If this is 



