40 POULTKY FEEDING AND FATTENING 



needed variety and also materially lessen the expense. 

 Do not keep food constantly before the fowls, if you do 

 not wish them to become disgusted and lose their 

 appetite. Give tincture of iron occasionally in their 

 drinking water. Eeliable tonics and condition powders 

 are all right in their place, but do not expect them 

 alone to make eggs without giving the proper food, as 

 seems to be the idea of some. Keep the hens at work. 

 This is very important — you cannot give a laying hen 

 too much exercise when cooped. An idle hen soon grows 

 too fat to lay. Encourage them to scratch and work 

 for their food, by throwing the grain among a litter 

 of leaves and straw. Give them corn on the cob and 

 throw them millet heads in which the seed has ripened 

 and oats in the sheaf. Suspend cabbage heads with the 

 heads downward, so that they can barely reach them. 

 The hens that in February are laying eggs for 

 hatching must have a large amount of exercise, and 

 must be fed a ration that will keep them in good con- 

 dition — neither too fat nor too poor — and they must 

 have good, fresh air, for eggs laid in ill-smelling 

 quarters are not the eggs from which to expect chickens. 

 It is easy enough to secure exercise for the poultry in 

 winter. Just fill the pens eight or ten inches deep with 

 refuse hay, corn butts, chaff and other litter, the whole 

 underlaid with gravel, and keep the hens hungry 

 enough to work diligently for the grain that is scattered 

 in it. Peed a scant breakfast of mush that has bran, 

 flour, corn meal, crushed oats and some kind of meat 

 meal in it, and then keep the hens scratching all day 

 for the few handfuls of wheat and cracked corn that are 

 thrown, a little at a time, into the litter, keeping a 

 window open in the pen when the weather will permit. 

 At night give the hens all they want of cracked corn, 

 oats, wheat and l)a,rley, and keep grit, charcoal and clean 

 water before them all the time. 



