1861. 



NEW ENGLAND FARMER. 



191 



the table. If you are near a good market, where 

 you can reach it once or twice each day with early 

 vegetables, there would be more profit in raising 

 vegetables than poultry. 



4. Sell the milk at four cents a quart. As an 

 average, it will require, at least, six quarts of 

 milk for a pound of butter, (and probably more,) 

 which, at four cents, would be twenty-four cents. 

 If it should require eight quarts, you would get 

 thirty-two cents — twelve cents more than you 

 would get for the butter ; but if you made butter 

 you would have the skim and butter-milk, so that 

 the difference, (saying nothing of the labor re- 

 quired to make the butter,) would not be ma- 

 terial, 



5. Cows or Slieep. We cannot tell. It depends 

 upon circumstances. What your farm is, where 

 you are located, how much skill you possess, Szc. 



6. If you keep hogs to labor for you, as you do 

 a hired man, and wish them to root up a lot, or 

 overhaul manure, then you must arrange them 

 accordingly ; but if you keep them, as we do, to 

 eat largely with a good appetite and grow fast, 

 you will have them in a place where they can go 

 to the ground, or to a dry, warm bed, at their 

 pleasure. You can then dress them at about 

 twelve months old weighing between four and 

 five hundred pounds, and at a cost of five or six 

 cents per pound. It is a common practice for pigs 

 to run on the manure heaps — we doubt whether 

 any Bpeciai advantage is derived from it. We 

 should prefer to have it left as thrown down. 

 Horse manure heats, and must be scattered occa- 

 sionally ; but if muck or loam were mingled with 

 it, fermentation would, in a great measure, be 

 prevented. The advantage of having the pigs in 

 the manure cellar is, that it affords them shelter 

 and warmth, and saves the expense of a regular 

 piggery. When our hogs eat and sleep well, and 

 work but little, we find the most profit in them. 

 A good farm hand, by devoting one hour in a 

 week to the manure heap, will do more good than 

 a pig will by rooting over or trampling it down. 

 When a pig roots, he expends the milk and meal 

 you have fed to him, in that labor, instead of lay- 

 ing on flesh and fat with it. If the swine are kept 

 by themselves, however, they should be well sup- 

 plied with all proper materials for making ma- 

 nure. 



7. Hen Manure is good guano. Mix it thor- 

 oughly with old muck, sand or loam, until no 

 lumps remain, ten or twelve parts of loam to one 

 of the hen droppings. Apply a handful to the 

 hill for corn, or use it in drills about the garden. 

 Few fertilizers are equal to it. 



8. Do not know what harrow is best. Have 

 not used them all. Holbrook's hinge harrow is 

 an excellent one ; so is Bucklin's, especially 

 where the furrows are very tough. 



9. You cannot raise fodder corn profitably by 

 subtracting the manure for it from your corn field. 

 If you must have the fodder, plant a less breadth 

 in corn, and manure it well as far as you go. 



For the New Ensland Farmer. 

 HOB ART & SPAULDING'S HAKROW. 



It is now conceded by all good cultivators that 

 the thorough harrowing and pulverization of the 

 soil is as necessary to ensure extra crops as good 

 plowing. Having more than twenty-five acres of 

 ground to seed with grain and grass in the spring 

 of 1860, some of it being very tough and full of 

 meadow grass roots, and being satisfied that the 

 straight tooth would not pulverize the soil and 

 mix the manure with it, I purchased one of the 

 Pepperell Harrows. It has answered the purpose 

 completely. I first tried it on a swamp which had 

 been planted with potatoes, then grass, and grav- 

 eled in '59 with one large ox load to the rod, and 

 then the effect was to intermix mud, manure and 

 gravel, and reduce the land to an even surface as 

 no other harrow would have done. I then used 

 it on a low piece of springy ground, where the 

 soil was about ten inches deep, and plowed the 

 November before. This land was underdrained 

 and reclaimed some twenty years before, but 

 meadow and hassock grass had worked out the 

 better kinds, and reduced the crops to less than 

 fifteen hundred pounds to the acre, and by run- 

 ning this harrow both ways, it was made as fine 

 as an old field. The crop of oats was abundant, 

 nearly paying all the labor, with a fine prospect for 

 grass the present season. I also tried it when 

 wood had been recently cut, and although many 

 small stones and some large ones were in the 

 way, still the work was so much better done than 

 with any other harrow, that I recommend its use 

 even then. I have no hesitation in saying that it 

 clogs less and does the work better on hard land 

 than any other harrow in use. 



Concord, March 11, 1861. E. Wood, Jr. 



Finding Fault with your Children. — It is 

 at times necessary to censure and punish ; but 

 very much more may be done by encouraging 

 childi-en when they do well. Be, therefore, more 

 careful to express your approbation of good con- 

 duct than your disapprobation of bad. Nothing 

 can more discourage a child than a spirit of in- 

 cessant fault-finding on the part of its parent ; 

 and hardly anything can exert a more injurious 

 influence upon the disposition both of the parent 

 and child. There are two great motives influen- 

 cing human actions — hope and fear. Both of 

 these are at times necessary. But who would not 

 prefer to have her child influenced to good con- 

 duct by a desire of pleasing, rather than by the 

 fear of offending ? If a mother never expresses 

 her gratiflcation when her children do well, and 

 is always censuring them when she sees anything 

 amiss, they are discouraged and unhappy ; their 

 dispositions become hardened and soured by this 

 ceaseless fretting; and, at last, finding that, 

 whether they do well or ill, they are equally 

 found fault with, they relinquish all efforts to 

 please, and become heedless of reproach. 



