136 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST, 
[April, 
Walks and Talks on the Farm— Ho. 136. 
[COPYRIGHT SECURED.] 
The winter has been very severe. With eight 
horses, nine cows, one hundred longwooled sheep, 
and over a hundred pigs, we have not been troubled 
for occupation. The “dull and lonely life of the 
farmer,” which we sometimes read about, exists 
only in the imagination. There are drones in agri¬ 
culture as there are drones in all branches of indus¬ 
try. But a real farmer finds no want of incentives 
to earnest effort. Necessity is laid upon him. 
Shame be to him who has domestic animals under 
his care, and neglects to supply their wants. Do" 
not stop to ask if it “ will pay? ” That is not the 
question now. You should have asked that before 
the animals were on your hands. You must feed 
them, and take care of them, and make them com¬ 
fortable—or you must neglect them, and let them 
suffer, starve, or die. 
We had four or five days which tested our inge¬ 
nuity, skill, energy, and promptness. The ther¬ 
mometer one pleasant day stood at 40° in the 
shade, and 75° in the sun. The snow was melting 
rapidly, and we heard the agreeable sound of soft 
water running into the cistern. “To-morrow morn¬ 
ing,” I said, “ v r e will take some potatoes to the 
city.” Before night the wind began to blow, and 
the thermometer went down to 20°. We went to 
bed leaving the question of taking potatoes to the 
city, undecided. We would wait and see what the 
morrow would bring forth. It brought a great 
wind, and the thermometer down near zero. Our 
record showed three sows due that day. “ Give up 
everything else,” I said, “and devote yourselves 
entirely to making the stock comfortable. Stop up 
every crack. Keep a good fire in the steamer. 
Feed a little extra. Do not spare bedding.” And 
still the wind blew. Toward night the thermome¬ 
ter stood 6° below zero. “ You are wanted in the 
pig pen,” said Willie. I had expected such a 
message. The situation, when I got there, was not 
encouraging—four little pigs in a basket, and the 
sow restless. One pig so chilled that it could not 
stand. “ Had we not better take them to the fire 
in the steam-house?” “No,” I said, “we must 
bring the fire to them. Go and get a bag of steam¬ 
ed cut straw.” In the meantime I put the little 
pigs to the sow, and covered the sow and little 
ones with a horse blanket. Then we put the bag 
of warm chaff under the blanket. The warmth 
soon revived the little pigs, and the sow lay quiet 
and attended to her duties. The wind howled out¬ 
side. Thermometer 13° below zero. During the 
night “ No. 6,” a favorite sow, gave us nine nice 
pigs, and we saved every one. Thanks to the blanket. 
“Well, after all,” said the Deacon, “farming is 
a pretty slow and discouraging business. We 
thought we had got a mine of wealth in our apple 
crop, and now the price is so low that they hardly 
pay for picking, barreling, and drawing to market. 
The Squire has got a thousand barrels, and it is 
hard to dispose of anything but the choicest and 
largest fruit.”—“ That last remark,” I replied, “ is 
right to the point. We must pay more attention 
to quality. It is a wise and beneficient law, that 
the common necessaries of life should be furnished 
at a price little above the cost of production. 
Wheat, beef, mutton, pork, cheese, butter, apples, 
potatoes, and wool, can never long afford extrava¬ 
gant profits. It would be a great calamity should 
such be the case. It would cause great suffering. 
The same principle holds in the manufacture of all 
staple articles in general use. Competition fortu¬ 
nately keeps down the price. The aim of an intelli¬ 
gent manufacturer, is to lessen the cost of produc¬ 
tion, or to produce a better article. It must be so 
in farming and fruit growing.” 
There is no country in the world to-day, where 
the incentives to better farming are so great, or so 
numerous, as in the United States. Poor farming is 
very unprofitable. It gives us a fair crop in a 
favorable season. “Slovens do well once in seven 
years,” is an old agricultural proverb. Slovenly, 
slip-shod, hap-hazard farming, occasionally gives a 
fair crop. When such is the case, in a country so 
large and so thinly populated as ours, the markets 
are swamped, and down go prices. This will be 
the case for years in the future, as for years in the 
past. Corn will be 25c. to 40c. a bushel in the year 
ivhen slovens have a fair crop, and 75c. to §1.00 
in the years when only good farmers reap good 
harvests. 
Common apples will be no exception to this rule. 
The only men who will make money out of their 
apple orchards, will be those who either raise the 
choicest kinds, or those who, having standard 
varieties, like Baldwins and Greening, take great 
pains to keep up the fertility of their orchards, and 
to raise the largest and fairest specimens, free from 
specks and the ravages of the Codling moth. Such 
men will get fair crops in unfavorable seasons, and 
will then get good prices. 
“I think you are right,” said the Deacon, “but 
how are we to keep up the fertility of our orchards. 
The Squire has over 100 acres of orchard, and it is 
simply impossible for him to manure his orchards 
as you do yours.” 
This is true only in part. I have about 150 bear¬ 
ing Northern Spy trees, which are kept in grass. 
The grass is top-dressed more or less, nearly every 
year, and the field is pastured by sheep. The 
Squire can not adopt this plan with his whole 
orchard. He can not make manure enough. But 
I have a row of six Northern Spy trees separated 
from the rest of the orchard by a rail fence. The 
land on which these trees grow, is not manured. It 
is simply plowed and cultivated to kill weeds. No 
crop is grown. It is kept in fallow. These six 
trees do nearly or quite as well, and bear as large 
and as fair fruit as the trees kept in grass and 
manured. In fact, when J. J. Thomas was here, 
he thought the trees in the fallowed land made a 
little the best growth. The Squire could adopt 
this plan on his hundred acres, if lie would ; but he 
won’t. He wants to eat his cake and keep it. He 
wants to grow corn, potatoes, beans, wheat, hay, 
etc., in the orchard, and raise fine fruit besides. 
The Squire’s trees would do better in fallowed 
land than mine do, because his land is stronger and 
heavier; mine is a light sandy loam. I should 
never think of fallowing such light land with a 
view to enrich it. The heavier loams or clays, 
are actually enriched by thorough cultivation. 
Stirring and exposing the soil to the sun, and air, 
and frost, developes the latent plant-food which 
exists in all good clays. The object in cultivating 
an orchard in a light, sandy soil, is simply to pre¬ 
vent the growth of everything except the trees. 
Some fruit growers let weeds and other plants 
grow, and then plow them under. The objection 
to this is, that all plants during their growth, take 
up large quantities of water from the soil, and 
evaporate it through their leaves into the atmos¬ 
phere. The soil in the orchard would be much 
more moist if kept clear and free from weeds, than 
if the weeds and grass were allowed to grow. I 
would as soon think of letting weeds grow between 
the rows of corn, for the sake of enriching the soil, 
as to let them grow for the same object between 
the rows of trees. 
“ But you keep your own orchard in grass,” said 
the Deacon, “and it does not seem to rob the soil 
of moisture. The trees and branches are full of 
sap, and the dark green leaves, and the size of the 
fruit, show plainly enough that the trees get an 
ample supply of food and water.”—There are two 
reasons for this. 1st. Drouth has comparatively 
little effect on rich land. The “sap of the soil,” 
as I call it, is rich in plant-food, and the trees can 
get all the food they need, without absorbing so 
much water. I suppose, too, that this rich sap has 
a tendency to close up the pores of the leaves, and 
thus check evaporation—just as salt and plaster do 
when sown on wheat and clover fields. 2nd. The 
sheep eat the grass close to the ground. The 
blades of grass shoot up like asparagus, and are 
instantly cut by the sheep. There is little chance 
for the plants to evaporate moisture. I think this 
five acre of orchard produces a larger quantity of 
rich grass, than any other dozen acres on the farm. 
And what is more, it produces it in the dryest and 
hottest season, just when the other pastures are 
bare and brown, and when food is scarce and valu¬ 
able. Two or three days rest will at any time give 
me a nice bite of grass for the lambs. 
Now if I had the Squire’s hundred acres of 
orchard, I would adopt both of these plans. I 
would keep all the clay laud in fallow, and, in fact, 
at first I would fallow the whole of it. Then when 
I had got it as clean and mellow as a garden, I 
would begin to seed it down with grass and white 
clover. I would sow 200 lbs. superphosphate, and 
200 lbs. nitrate of soda, broadcast, per acre, early 
in the spring. This would give the grass a good 
start. When well established, turn in the sheep, 
and pasture lightly at first. 
If bone-dust could be got for §20 per ton, I 
would use it freely. If the Squire’s coarse strawy 
manure was thrown up into piles, and a little bone- 
dust, say 100 lbs. to each ton, was scattered on 
each layer of manure, it would make a capital 
dressing for his orchard. But in this section bran 
and clover hay are usually our cheapest manures. 
I would apply them freely to the newly-seeded 
orchard. “ Broadcast ? ” queried the Deacon, in a 
sarcastic tone. “ No,” I replied, “ cut the clover 
hay into chaff, and put it in racks in the orchard,, 
and let the sheep eat it. They will distribute it 
more evenly over the land than you can. Let the 
sheep have some bran put in the troughs every 
day, say from half a pound to a pound each sheep, 
and they will mix this up with the grass and clover, 
and distribute them over the orchard as manure. 
In some eases oil-cake, half a pound to each, may 
be fed to the sheep daily, to advantage. 
There was a large wool-dealer here the other day, 
from Philadelphia, and he carefully examined my 
flock of sheep. I have a few common Merino ewes, 
grade Cotswold-Merinos, with one, two, and three 
crosses of Cotswold blood, and lastly the pure bred 
Cotswolds—all running together in the same flock, 
and all having the same feed. He pronounced the 
grade with two or three crosses the most valuable 
wool in the flock, and the wool on the grades with 
only one cross, he said, was nearly or quite as valu¬ 
able as from the pure Cotswolds. “ What is the 
reason,” he asked, “ that farmers can not produce 
this grade wool. They are producing less and less 
of it every year?”—I do not suppose this is the 
exact truth; I suppose the manufacturers are 
using more of this kind of wool, and the supply 
does not, and is not likely to, keep up with the 
demand. 
Now, with the common Merino sheep, kept prin¬ 
cipally for wool, which can be produced on cheap 
land, and with comparatively little care and ex¬ 
pense, we can not afford to adopt the plan I have 
suggested, of feeding bran and clover-hay in sum¬ 
mer. We can not compete with the large flock 
masters, who have the free range of thousands of 
acres of natural pastures, in producing Merino 
wool. But we can compete with them in produc¬ 
ing the best combing wool and choice mutton. 
As population increases, the demand for good 
mutton will increase—faster than the supply. It 
is an interesting fact, that the wool most in de¬ 
mand, and which brings the highest price, should 
be grown on sheep which produce the cheapest 
and best mutton. 
To go back for a moment to the Squire, with his 
large farm and large orchard. He has plenty of 
land on which to keep a large flock of Merino 
ewes. He could easily keep two hundred. In my 
own case 60 common Merino ewes, put to a pure 
bred Cotswold ram, gave me 75 lambs, and I raised 
74, and healthier, stronger, hardier lambs I do not 
desire. At this rate his 200 ewes should raise 246 
lambs. He can buy good, strong, healthy ewes in 
the fall, for §3 a head or less. They should have 
good feed in the fall and winter. And when the 
lambs come, the ewes should have plenty of clover 
hay, and a pound of bran each per day ; and a few 
mangels will also be a great help, but are not in¬ 
dispensable. As soon as the lambs oan be taught 
to eat, say when ten days or two weeks old, 
