No. 4.] RAISING CHICKENS. 367 



house, or a convenient shed or outbuilding that could be used for the 

 sitters. From this point the farm has great advantages, and they 

 should be fully utilized. Even a farm too small to give fowls free 

 range without their trespassing on neighbors has advantages far sur- 

 passing those of the town poultryman, who must make up for lack of 

 natural advantages by special care to provide variety in food, to main- 

 tain a healthful cleanliness and to guard against the evils incident to 

 the crowding of chicks on limited areas. 



What farm is so small that, if the matter were systematically pro- 

 vided for, it could not furnish new ground, on which the grass was well 

 established, each year for the little chicks? With hay at the prices 

 which prevail in Massachusetts it seems sometimes almost a crime to 

 put chicks on mowing land before a crop has been taken from it, but 

 if there is no part of the pasture or orchard available for small chicks, 

 and convenient to the house, it will certainly pay the grower of 

 chickens to give up to the smallest of them a piece of grass land as 

 large as they need. That would be a piece as small as they could 

 keep the grass down on without killing it out. In an ordinary season 

 this would be a piece as large as required to place the coops about two 

 rods apart each way and have a margin about two rods wide outside 

 the coops all around the plot. In a wet season, or where the growth 

 was rank, the coops should be closer together; under the opposite 

 conditions, farther apart. The loss of hay from the land given up to 

 the chicks would be at least in part made up by the heavier crop from 

 the piece next year, for the droppings of the chicks will distribute 

 quite evenly over it a high-grade fertilizer, while whatever waste of 

 food there may be is not lost, the waste going to enrich the land. 



Supposing a piece of mowing land on which the grass is well up is to 

 be devoted to the little chicks. It should be mowed before they are 

 placed on it, because if left long the chicks would get too wet running 

 through it when the dew is on it in the morning and on wet days; and 

 so it would be necessary to keep them shut in the coops more than is 

 desirable. In respect to chicks running in wet grass it may be said 

 that rugged chicks are not injured by it in ordinary weather, when the 

 sun and air dry them quickly, and when the hen, confined to the coop, 

 keeps dry, and if wet and cold they can go to her and be quickly 

 warmed and dried; but weakly chicks do not stand much wetting, 

 nor can any chicks stand much wetting if they cannot quickly dry 

 themselves after it. Let chicks run when conditions are favorable, at 

 other times keep them confined. When there is so much unfavorable 

 weather that chicks would be shut in too much if this rule were fol- 

 lowed, keep coops in the same places long enough to keep the grass short 

 around them, and keep a dish of dry feed — shorts and meal mixed 

 dry will answer — beside the coop, that the chicks may remain near it. 



If the plot given to the chicks is convenient to the house the chicks 

 will nearly always get better attention than if it is at a distance, 



