HINTS ABOUT MANAGEMENT. 105 
plumage, the sooner will they begin to lay in the antumn. 
Pullets usually begin to lay as soon as they are com- 
pletely plumed as adult fowls. It is worth while, there- 
fore, to encourage moulting in every way, giving them 
exercise, insect food, or fish in their ration, with ground 
bone, ground oyster-shell, and sound grain. A table- 
spoonful of fine salt in the soft feed, given daily to a 
flock of twenty hens, will be a fair allowance. Fowls do 
not depend upon this for the salt which their bodies and 
feathers contain, for either the material itself, or the 
elements of which it is composed, exist to a greater or 
less extent in almost all the food they eat and the water 
they drink; and what we do by giving them salt is simply 
to increase the supply. 
GREEN FOOD FOR FOWLS. 
Fowls cannot be kept healthy without a good range, 
or a supply of green food in their yards. An excellent 
plan is, to have a roomy yard provided for them, and 
plant it with plum or dwarf pear trees. Plum-trees are 
very little troubled by curculios when planted in a 
chicken-yard, and good crops of fruit are secured, bar- 
ring accidents of weather at the blooming season. The 
yard is divided into two parts; one is used for a month, 
while the other is growing up with some green crop, as 
turnips, oats, peas, rape, or mustard, which are very ac- 
ceptable to the fowls. This yard is then used, and the 
other is plowed and immediately sown. This keeps the 
ground clean, provides suitable food, and avoids most 
effectively the troublesome disease known as gapes; the 
fatal cholera is also evaded by this management; the 
health being improved, more eggs will be laid. 
