50 
AMERICAI^ AGEIOULTUEIST. 
[February, 
Poultry-Yard Convenience. 
Figure 1 represents a combined portable coop 
and yard for setting liens, and when they are with 
the young chicks. The part a, is enclosed with 
half-inch boards, with a hinged cover, m, and a 
movable slide, c, opening into the little yard. 
Fig. 1.— A POULTKT COOP AND TABD. 
Another sliding door, c7, is for entering to the yard 
from the outside. Cliickens, eggs, and hen can 
then be handled through the cover. The dimen¬ 
sions are two-and-a-half by six feet; bight eighteen 
inches. The resting-place space occupies one- 
third, leaving four by two- 
and-a-half feet for a yard. A 
tight floor keeps the moisture 
from the nest and brood. 
After the chickens go into 
shelter for the night, the slid¬ 
ing door, should be pushed 
down. This movable coop 
allows a frequent change of 
pasture for the chicks. The 
strips to which the laths are 
nailed, are four inches wide. 
The two at the top have a 
continuation at each end of 
eight inches, to serve as han¬ 
dles for moving the coop. 
Figure 2 represents a covered 
feeding table, which allows 
the chickens to eat at any time 
under shelter, but prevents 
them from wasting any of the 
food. The trough is one foot 
wide, and four feet long. 
The table a is eighteen inches 
wide, and four-aud-a-half feet 
long. The roof, ^,is two-and-a- 
half feet wide atdhe base and 
five long, which gives protec¬ 
tion enough to shelter the 
chickens while eating. The 
trough,f,is open at the bottom, 
o, allowing the grain to work 
through upon the table below, 
keeping up a supply as long as 
any remains. A narrow strip, s, 
nailed along the edge of the table, keeps the chick¬ 
ens from working the grain out upon the ground. 
The table stands upon four legs (not shown), which 
also support the trough and roof. The roof can 
be lifted off for tilling the trough with grain. 
-FEED BOX. 
Sowing Spring Wheat. 
PROF. S. K. THOMPSON. 
In the spring wheat regions of the West and 
Northwest, sowing will begin in the latter part of 
this month, or early in the next. Old settlers 
know the advantages of sowing spring-wheat as 
early as possible. New comers who are not too 
knowing to heed the results of experience, will get 
in their seed as soon as the frost is out sufficiently to 
allow it. Where the ground was fall-plowed for 
wheat, as should always be done, the seeding may 
almost always begin by the first week in March. 
In western Nebraska wheat is frequently sown by 
the middle of February ; in the eastern part of the 
State a little later. When the ground is dry and 
mellow, as it usually is, wheat may well be covered 
(deeper than in the East, and deeper on newly 
broken than on old land. The best crops of wheat 
the writer ever grew, were the first crops on new 
-land, broken deeply, and stirred still deeper the 
season before. The seed was covered with a four- 
shovel corn plow, to an average depth of three 
inches. In one case a part of the field was seeded in 
this way, and another sown broad-cast by hand and 
harrowed in ; the former yielded twenty-eight, and 
the latter twenty-three bushels per acre. On moist 
land, or that broken many years before, or quite 
moist, shallower seeding does best. The deeper 
seeding suffers less from hard frosts, always to be 
expected after spring wheat is in. In certain sea¬ 
sons wheat seems to do better when drilled in, 
which is always better to secure iiniform depth; 
but on old land the spaces between the rows fur¬ 
nish such a favorable place for weeds to grow, that 
on the whole, broad-cast sowing seems to be the 
most satisfactory, when the seed can be covered 
deep enough. It may be suggested to new 
comers that usually wheat is grown profitably 
only on new land. On that under cultivation four 
or five years, some other crop is more likely to pay. 
This is for the latitude of Nebraska. In Dakota it 
may be different; time will tell. It is always dan¬ 
gerous, sometimes ruinous, to confine farming to a 
single crop, and particularly so with wheat. The 
outlay for seed, harvesting and threshing, is so 
great that a poor crop results not merely in loss of 
time and labor, or of prospective profits, but of 
capital invested. And finally, on this and kindred 
questions, farmers new to the West are advised to 
listen to the opinions, and profit by the experience 
of those who have been longer on the ground. 
Those who are too knowing or too conceited to do 
this, may have occasion to recall the saying of wise 
old Ben. Franklin: -'If you will not hear expe¬ 
rience, she will rap your knuckles.” 
Fish and Fruit in Florida. 
BT ROBERT BARNWEIL ROOSEVEI.T. 
At Jacksonville we felt almost as much at home 
as if we were in New York. We found friends 
there, W'e made others, and enjoyed ourselves so 
thoroughly that it was only the imperative demands 
of sport that compelled us to move on. Near so 
large a city there is naturally not much to shoot 
or to catch. There are innumerable ten-pound 
cat-fish which our companion, Seth Green, the 
fish culturist, was never tired of taking. He 
insisted they were excellent eating, a matter 
in which we allowed him to have his opinion 
without contesting the question. The water 
on the surface is fresh, and some black-bass 
can always be caught in the vicinity. The condi¬ 
tion of the water in the St. John’s is different from 
that of any other stream with which I am familiar. 
Even up to Pilatka, seventy-five miles above, the 
surface water is absolutely fresh, while near the 
bottom there is a current so salt that crabs are 
caught in the shad nets. The salter fluid seems to 
be denser and heavier than the other, and will not 
mingle with it, so that we have the anomaly of both 
fresh and salt-water fish being caught at the same 
time and ijlace. 
Into the St. John’s there empty at every few 
miles tributary streams that are rarely ascended by 
the visiting sportsman, and where the birds and 
fish exist in their primeval abundance and fearless¬ 
ness. It is unnecessary to specify these by name, 
or to particularize any as better than others, for 
they are essentially alike. We could not explore 
them all, but those which we did, we found filled 
with fish and with a fair amount of game. It was 
too early in the year for alligators, if they can be 
called game, to show themselves, but birds were to 
be had plentifully, and fish were simply innumer¬ 
able. Of these we killed so many that we had to 
salt them down. There is an additional interest, 
the interest of new explorations, in ascending the 
secluded rivers, and I advise every tourist who 
visits this portion of Elorida in his own conveyance, 
not to omit going up one or more of them. 
This was a late season, shad w'ere running, and 
we had them continually on our table, but roses 
were not in full bloom in the open air, and as for 
strav/berries, which are usually abundant by New 
Year’s, they had not come in at .all yet. Wo had 
bought up all the curiosities that we could distri¬ 
bute among our Northein friends ; we had played 
with the baby alligators in the jewelry stores; we 
had listened to the first installment of the wonder¬ 
ful Florida stories ; we had dined at all the excel¬ 
lent Jacksonville hotels, and were ready to with¬ 
draw once more from civilization. So the Hearts¬ 
ease spread her sails again, and started up the river. 
I say “up,” because by the current our course 
was up stream ; but it was down by the map. We 
were going south, the St. John’s being one of the 
fev/ of the North American rivers which seem to 
run the wrong way, that is, from the south 
to the north. In our short stay in Jackson¬ 
ville we had learned that alligator-tooth jewelry is 
occasionally made of celluloid; that one of the 
best drinks in the world of bar-keeping is a punch 
compounded from the native sour orange ; that 
Florida stories are always reliable, even when they 
assert that mosquitoes are so abundant that hogs 
make meals of them, or inform us that the favorite 
game fish of Florida, the tarpon, jumps six feet out 
of water when he is hooked, or that sharks will 
seize a man if they have to leap as high as the 
deck of the yacht to do so. In leaving Jackson¬ 
ville, we supposed we were leaving all this behind 
us, not knowing that Florida is full of quaint jew¬ 
elry made, as the jewelry of no other part of the 
world, out of fish scales, saurian teeth, sea beans, 
shells, orange tree woods, and sharks’ molars ; that 
everywhere there are wonderful stories which only 
differ from one another in size; that palmetto hats 
were to be bought in every village store, and that 
sour oranges hang from innumerable trees, value¬ 
less for traffic, and only begging to be made into 
nectar fit for gods. 
B}' the time the Doctor had made these philo¬ 
sophical reflections. Heartsease was tearing along 
before a favoring breeze past Mandarin, past the 
Magnolia Hotel and Green Cove Spring; past 
Tocoi, the terminus of the St. Augustine Railroad, 
till she made anchorage by nightfall off Pilatka. 
On the way we had put up many ducks, and seen 
the cows up to their backs in water feeding off the 
cabbage at the bottom, and thrusting their heads 
clear under to get it, and we began to realize tha.t 
in the end we might come to believe anything of 
the wonders of this wonderful laud. On the last 
day of our stay in Jacksonville, we had given a little 
lunch on board, and to show what dinners can be 
got up there, and how easily, I will reproduce the' 
bill of fare. Everything had been prepared on 
board, and although our cabin could only seat 
twelve, we placed before the guests cold turkey, 
beef and tongue, chicken salad prepared by the 
Doctor in most artistic style, stewed oysters, roast 
potatoes, radishes, and for dessert banana salad— 
an invention of the better part of the party,—Dum- 
mit Grove oranges,'sapidillas, and grape fruit, with 
pieces montees of palmetto leaves and sour oranges 
en. branches. There was a little pate de foies gras 
also, but that need not be counted, because it came 
from the North. 
"We found that when we had reached Pilatka the 
stories, instead of diminishing, developed yet more 
astonishing proportions. The mosquitoes, that the 
hogs fed on at Jacksonvillle, put out the head light 
of the locomotive at Pilatka, extinguished a bon¬ 
fire, and made nothing of the negroes’ “ light w’ood 
torches ; ” the tarpon of Jacksonville could only 
jump six feet high when hooked, while the tarpon 
of Pilatka, without being hooked, bounded clear 
over the rail of the steamboat Seth Low, which 
was ten feet from the water, struck the captain in 
the stomach and knocked him down. IVe had not 
been at Pilatka two days, before we were ready to 
swallow any mental hallucination, so rapidly does 
faith grow in the glorious and balmy air of Elorida. 
If Jacksonville had been attractive, Pilatka was 
equally so. Opposite to it is the famous orange 
I grove of Mr. Hart, which we had to visit, and where 
we ate our first oranges plucked by ourselves from 
the trees, besides tasting mandarins and tangerines, 
lemons, limes, guavas and bananas, and that best 
of all oranges, the grape fruit. There were great 
plantations of bananas, which grow by suckers 
from the roots, and increase like weeds. They have 
