214 



THE GENESEE FARMER. 



Sept. 



best substitute for bars that I know of. A, A, scant- 

 ling, 3 by 4. B, strip of. board nailed tight. C, C, 

 wheels, six inches in diameter. To be made mainly 

 of fence boards, and run on narrow plank six or eight 

 inclies wide ; and the one the gate runs on when 

 opened, should have strips an inch thick fastened on 

 each side of where the wheels run, to guide it. Two 

 stalies firmly set and pinned at the top will keep the 

 gate upright, and two more at the other end may 

 serve to keep it firm without any other fastening than 

 having the pin D run between them. A narrow 

 strip, tlie thickness of the board D, should be nailed 

 on the upper board its whole length. 



This is called a snowy region ; but I have not 

 known the snow to offer any very serious obstacle to 

 this gate. I have used three for two or three years, 

 and have sometimes shoved them into a snow drift to 

 get them open. The farmers here prefer this gate 

 to any other, as far as I know. N. N. — Oswego 

 Co., JV. Y., 1850. 



S. W.'S NOTES FOR THE MONTH. 



SulUERing Corn. — The last Rural New Yorker 

 says : " We find some persons still adhering to the 

 exploded doctrine of the necessity of pulling off the 

 suckers from Indian corn." I would as soon accuse 

 that pomologist of pursuing an exploded practice, 

 who takes from a tree a part of its redundant fruit, 

 that the remainder may improve in size and quality. 

 I have found from repeated experfmenls, tliat corn 

 deprived of its suckers will be some ten days earlier 

 than the unsuckered corn, and the main ears will be 

 larger and better filled. 'Tis true that the suckers 

 hear a " beggarly account'' of nubbins, which may 

 help out the bulk of ears ; but methinks the suekered 

 stalks will yield enough more in weight of sound 

 shelled corn to make up for the nubbins. I am yet 

 to be convinced tliat the pollen from the suckers is 

 of other use than to fructify the ears produced by the 

 suckers themselves. So far as fodder is taken into 

 the account, the advantage is undoubtedly with the 

 unsucl^ed corn : hence I take it, that farmers with 

 large fields and little help will find it to their account 

 to let suckers mature ; while he who grows corn for 

 the early green ears, will never fail to cut off the 

 suckers, and remove every barren stalk from his corn 

 patch. Before July had passed away, I had plenty 

 of plump ears of eight rowed, large kernel, white 

 corn, more than six inches in length. This variety 

 has been improved by cultivation from a very short 

 ear to one of fair length ; the stalk also increases in 

 size and height ; but it also matures later, maugre 

 the precaution of saving the earliest ears for seed. 



Free Trade in Bread. — In the death of Sir Rob't 

 Peel the yet struggling friends of commercial free- 

 dom in Great Britain have lost an able advocate. 

 Let every American farmer bless his memory, since 

 it was under his ministry, and mainly owing to his 

 unanswerable arguments, that the most odious re- 

 strictions on our agricultural productions were re- 

 moved. While in England every loaf of bread made 

 of imported flour paid a tax to the landlord and the 

 farmer, in these United States the farmer is almost 

 the only great producer who has never yet clamored 

 for a bounty on his industry, by a tax on the other 

 classes. Hence it is that the farmers of these United 

 States are the most self-relying of men. God grant 

 that they may never know the effect of that luxury 



which is compassed only by selling dear bread to the 

 poor and hungry million ! 



The Wheat Crop and the Coming Price. — All 

 accounts agree that the present yield of wheat in the 

 United States is above the average of former years ; 

 add to this the increased culture of this cereal, and 

 the quantity for sale will be unprecedented. Hence 

 it may he inferred that without an increased demand 

 for export, prices must rule very low the coming 

 year. Let me then enumerate some of the causes 

 which will keep up the price of wheat to an average 

 of former years. In the first place, foreign emigra- 

 tion is steadily increasing, and most of the emigrants 

 of former years, as well as all of the present, will 

 have to buy bread ; then the failure of the wheat 

 crop last year in Ohio, the greatest wheat growing 

 State in the Union, led to the exhaustion of every 

 granary, many of which contained the wheat of for- 

 mer crops ; then the great increase of villages and 

 cities throughout young America ; the great and in- 

 creasing demand for bread-stuffs induced by our man- 

 ufacturing industry — not as of old, in New England 

 alone ; but all over the length and breadth of our 

 land, from Maine to New Orleans, and the great 

 west. No country on this globe ever had a home 

 trade so rapidly, not to say magically, increasing, as 

 ours. No country so young in years can boast, or 

 ever could boast, of a manufacturing industry so 

 great, extended, varied, and increasing as ours. — 

 Even those cotton lords in New England, who of 

 late have closed some of their mills, confess that the 

 competition from within has become more formidable 

 than it ever was from without. Then the great in- 

 crease in public works of every kind and fashion — 

 the multiplicity of rail-roads and plank-roads, which 

 employ so many in the construction, and so many in 

 tending and repairing. And then there is the extra 

 trade induced by these facilities. 



The Season and. the Crops. — The wheat liarvest 

 is now over : the crop is large, and it has been gen- 

 erally well secured in spite of the hot weather. — 

 Such a growth of grass, oats, barley, Indian corn, 

 See, few other seasons ever produced. Those who 

 aver that vegetation within the tropics during the 

 rainy season far surpasses ours, had not observed 

 the rank growth of this season in Western New 

 York. Go into a well tended garden, and see how 

 the vegetables jostle each other : no line cf demarka- 

 tion is observable just now (1 2th of August) between 

 the beds. Every thing vegetable has not only ex- 

 ceeded Tts wonted altitude, but both bush and vine 

 have gone entirely over every prescribed limit as- 

 signed to them by the best practical experience. — 

 Although we have had much and frequont rains, the 

 present has been everything but a cold, wet sumui; r. 

 All our wet summers before this have been invariably 

 accompanied by cool, cloudy weather. We have 

 had no cool weatlier this season since the 3d of Juno. 



State Agricultural Fairs. — It behooves the 

 Executive Committees of our Empire State Fair to 

 look well to its interests this year, as the Cincinnati 

 papers promise that the coming Ohio Slate Fair aliall 

 not be eclipsed. There is a rife spirit of rural pro- 

 gress in great wheat-growing Oliio, if we n*iy judge 

 from the number and ability of the farmer corres- 

 ])ondents of Batkuam's Ohio Cultivatpr. If they do 

 invoke the aid of their State Legislature, they put 

 their own shoulders to the wheel nevertheless, as if 

 determined not to be behind their earlier endowed 

 siBler, tlic Empire State. — IValerloo, Aug., 1850. 



