FATTENING. 53 



After rearing your chickens, your next consideration is 



FATTENING 



For table or market ; it is best accomplished by cooping in a mo- 

 derately warm, rather dark, quiet place, with good ventilation, 

 and the fowl fed on boiled or steamed potatoes, into which oats 

 or oatmeal, is blended with sweet milk, and some fine sand added, 

 and given warm, but not hot the fattening will be accomplished 

 in a fortnight or boiled carrots, with beans, peas, or barley and 

 sweet milk ; in all cases of cooping, the fowl must be kept dry, 

 clean, and warm. 



Nothing is easier kept than fowl; they obtain their living 

 promiscuously, and pick up every thing that can be made use of 

 as food, in the farm-yard, even the worms give them most nutri- 

 tious food ; and since the blight has proved so destructive to the 

 potato crop, it has been satisfactorily proved, there is no substi- 

 tute for it, as a feeder or fattener of poultry, or a promoter of 

 laying ; if the potatoes are broken, and if a little corn be added, 

 they will be the more palatable ; the more varied the food the 

 better ; boiled carrots, turnips, parsnips, Jerusalem artichokes, or 

 other roots, boiled and mashed with bran, form a healthful variety ; 

 as to green food, they are partial to lettuce, endive, cabbage, spinach, 

 radish, turnip, mangel-wurzel, chickweed, grass seeds, &c., and 

 if insectivorous food is wished for, there is nothing more easily 

 procured, at almost any season, by procuring a deep crock, into 

 which put some bran, and on it lay a piece of carrion or other 

 flesh, cover it with a glass cap so as to admit the light, but exclude 

 the rain ; in a few days it will be a moving mass of living in- 

 sects, which you can throw out to your poultry ; there is nothing 

 they will so greedily devour ; they should be sparingly given, as 

 the fowl are so fond of them, that if given abundantly it will 

 prevent them taking their usual food. 



The Royal Dublin Society, having long wished for the introduc- 

 tion of the American turkey, I have been fortunate in procuring 

 some fine specimens. 



