11 ON ROOT CROPS. 



entirely disappeared from the books and agricultural papers, Swedish 

 turnips being almost the only thing of the kind now talked of. 



The^/ suffer less from frost. Turnips can be left safely in the 

 ground till all other crops are gathered in. The ground may freeze 

 quite hard without serious injury to the crop; and then they may 

 be kept in a cellar entirely too cold for any other roots. 



They will keep late in the spring, if kept cold. The English 

 turnip grows corky, but the French and Swedish do not. 



Swine will grow and fatten on them. Judge Buel said that his 

 neighbor Bement, of Albany, kept twenty hogs, mostly full grown 

 breeders, from the 1st of November to the 15th of February, in the 

 winter of 1638 and '39, upon ruta baga and buckwheat bran, giving 

 them six bushels of roots and one of bran each day, at three feed- 

 ings — two of the feedings being on raw roots, and one on boiled. 

 " When he began to feed with the roots, the hogs were low in flesh ; 

 at the termination of the three and a half months, they were too 

 thrifty for breeding, and some of them fit for the butcher. The 

 owner estimated that four quarts of corn to each hog per day, for 

 all that time, would not have brought them into a better condition 

 than did the turnips and bran." The corn, at seventy cents per 

 bushel, would be worth one dollar and seventy-five cents per day. 

 The six bushels of roots, at twenty-five cents per bushel, would be 

 worth but one dollar and fifty cents. The bushel of bran would cost 

 but a trifle, of course. But suppose the expense were equal. An 

 acre of turnips does but moderately well when it produces 600 

 bushels to the acre ; — this would be equal to 100 bushels of corn, 

 which is an amount that few fields in Massachusetts ever produce. 



Neat Cattle do well on turnips. Gov. Hill tried it in the winter 

 of 1839. He gave his oxen turnips once a day, cutting them with 

 his own hands ; and he says that with the aid of the coarsest inter- 

 val hay, they worked nearly every week-day, and continued to 

 thrive : — and cows fed with the same, and corn butts and oat straw, 

 yielded milk abundantl}^ — much more, says he, than if fed on the 

 best hay. The objection that the milk tastes of the turnip is not 

 well founded ; it will taste if cows eat the tops ; and so will the 

 beef of the animal that feeds on tops ; — but the most abundant 

 feeding of the root itself communicates no disagreeable flavor, but 

 contributes to the flesh of the one and the milk uf the other. 



