PROPER FOOD FOR FOWLS. 201 



What food will cause hens to. lay the most eggs, is a ques- 

 tion that will never be decided. Some say, feed oats ; others, 

 buckwheat, &c. ; but it is a judicious rotation of feeding that 

 produces the best results, in my opinion. No one kind of food 

 will make hens lay well, unless they are provided with the 

 requisite concomitants, such as fresh meat, fat, charcoal, and 

 calcareous matter, to assist nature in forming the shell of the 

 egg, all of which is found in a wide range, without our especial 

 attention, or at least enough to cause a hen to lay her maximum 

 number of eggs. 



Broom-corn seed is a good grain to feed to fowls. They will 

 not eat it in its whole state, with that avidity that they will eat 

 other grains ; but the grower of broom-corn can, by grinding, 

 turn this seed to a good account, in feeding it to his poultry. 



Sun-flower-seeds have been highly recommended as food for 

 fowls. I have fed them, but have not seen any particular ben- 

 efit from their use. Fowls require grass to eat to a certain 

 extent, and they should never be confined where they cannot 

 have access to it, and if they are confined so as not to be able 

 to obtain a supply of bugs and worms, a little flesh of some 

 kind is absolutely necessary to their productiveness. As to 

 burnt bones, mortar, pounded oyster shells, charcoal, <fcc., no 

 one should think of keeping a large number of fowls, or even 

 any number, without furnishing a supply of these things, unless 

 his fowls have a very extensive range ; and even in that case, it 

 would be to his interest to provide them. Nolan makes the 

 following remarks in his work on fowls : 



Nothing is easier kept than fowls. They obtain their living pro- 

 miscuously, and pick up everything that can be made use of as food, 

 in the farm-yard ; even the worms give them most nutritious food 

 and since the blight has proved so destructive to the potatoe crop, it 

 has been satisfactorily proved, there is no substitute 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 palata- 

 ble ; the more varied the food, the better ; boiled carrots, turneps, 

 parsneps, Jerusalem artichokes, or other roots, boiled and mashed 

 with bran, form a healthful variety. As to green food, they are par- 

 tial to lettuce, endive, cabbage, spinach, radish, turnep, mangel- 

 wurtzel, chickweed, grass seeds, <fcc. ; 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 insects, which you can throw out to your 

 poultry ; there is nothing they will so greedily devour ; they should 

 9* 



