1S70.J 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
255 
mutton. I do not want to see meat any cheap¬ 
er ; but I do want, both for our own interests, 
and those of the consumer, to furnish meat of 
the best quality. Cheap as our mutton often is, 
it is the dearest meat in the market. Thousands 
and tens of thousands of sheep are sold that do 
not dress over 35 lbs. From 50 to 60 per cent 
of the meat consists of water. How much of 
the remainder consists of good digestible meat, 
and how much of bones, skin, and tough indi¬ 
gestible muscle, has not yet been determined.— 
But it is a pretty large proportion. We may 
urge people to eat less pork and more mutton, 
but it will do no good unless we provide mut¬ 
ton that approximates more closely to pork in 
actual nutriment. We ought to be able to pro¬ 
duce a pound of mutton that shall contain as 
much available nitrogen and carbon as a pound 
of pork, and at less cost. This should be the 
aim of our breeders and feeders. When this is 
the case, we shall be a mutton-eating instead of 
a pork-eating people. Our mutton must con¬ 
tain less water and more (invisible) fat. It must 
be grown more rapidly, and fatted while the 
sheep or lamb is growing. I believe that the 
time will come when we shall have sheep that 
can make as much fat and flesh out of a given 
amount of real food as a pig. At present, our 
best mutton breeds, such as the Cotswold, Lei¬ 
cester, and South-Down, will not approximate 
to a pig in this respect—and the fact is not cred¬ 
itable to our intelligence and skill as breeders. 
Let us turn our attention to this subject. 
Several fields of winter wheat have been 
plowed up in this neighborhood. Trouble, 
“ winter-kill,” which is only another name for 
water-kill, or want of draining. Many other 
I fields are badly spotted. We attribute it to the 
snow, 6r the frost, or the wind, or the rain, or 
the sun. But if you would listen thoughtfully, 
you would hear the dying wheat on every one 
of these bare spots calling “tiles, tiles.” By 
and by we shall have a drouth, and our clay 
land will be gaping with cracks, and we shall be 
praying for rain. I believe we should pray with 
more faith if we put in more drains. I am tired 
hearing men complain of the climate. If they 
would work more and grumble less, the seasons 
would be more favorable. “But we have not 
the capital to drain, and if we had, we cannot 
get men to do the work.”—When you quarreled 
with your neighbor about the division-fence, 
you found money to pay the lawyers. And 
you spent more time and money to establish a 
claim to a few square rods of land that will not 
pay you a dollar a year, than would have drained 
ten acres of land. And that ten acres would 
have given you more real profit than you now 
get, after deducting the orchard, from your 
whole farm of seventy-five acres. I could easi¬ 
ly show this to be an absolute fact. 
The Doctor has gone on a trip to California, 
and is delighted with the people and the coun¬ 
try. The soil is the richest he has ever seen, the 
people the most generous and warm-hearted, 
and the scenery the finest in the world. In the 
Napa Valley he was told “ that 110 bushels of 
wheat had been raised there on one acre of 
land.” “Another gentleman of unquestionable 
veracity,” he writes, “ told me that he had har¬ 
vested, from three acres of wheat, 308 bushels.” 
“But,” he adds, “you never saw such farming. 
They plow only two or three inches deep, and 
crop the land with wheat year after year, for 
from 10 to 20 years. The consequence is, their 
land has become foul, and now they do not av¬ 
erage more than 20 bushels per acre. What is 
needed to renovate the land is a rotation of crops 
and deeper plowing. Our clover will not an¬ 
swer, it dies out during the long, dry season.— 
They have a weed which they call clover, but 
it has not been used to any extent to fertilize 
the soil. In years back, wheat has been so high 
in price, that farmers have raised it almost exclu¬ 
sively. They even buy their vegetables and 
meat. In many cases they have what is called 
a ‘volunteer crop;’ i. e., the wheat which shells 
during harvest germinates, and often produces a 
fair crop. In some cases they will harrow grass 
land and sow wheat, and get a tolerable crop.” 
Sheep are kept in great numbers, and this is 
the most profitable branch of farming in Cali¬ 
fornia. A man with a few hundred dollars, 
who is willing to withdraw from society, can 
soon get rich by keeping sheep. They feed on 
the hills and valleys, and no provision is needed 
for the winter. “I dare not report,” he says, 
“what several poor men are now worth who 
went into this business a few years ago.” 
A farmer in Canada writes: “I have 5 acres 
of hop-yard, and the crops of 1868 and 1869 are 
lying unsold in Liverpool. Shall I keep on 
raising hops or not? What is the best kind of 
broom-corn to grow in Canada?”—I can answer 
neither question. As a rule I would advise a 
farmer not to embark in any branch of farming 
that he does not understand, simply because for 
the time being it happens to be very profitable. 
But if I went into it, I would stick to it. Of all 
men, a farmer should not “ make haste to be 
rich.” I should have little faith in the ultimate 
success of a farmer who is always going into new 
things. To tell the truth, however, it is seldom 
the farmer’s fault. Some of his city friends say, 
“ Why don’t you go into hops ? So and So made 
$5,000 last year from his hop-yard. You can’t 
make money raising corn and potatoes.” Then 
they ask, “ Why don’t you raise broom-corn ?—■ 
You can make more money from 5 acres than 
you now make from your whole farm?” Then 
it is Poland oats, or Essex pigs, or Cotswold 
sheep, or anything that happens to be popular 
and profitable for the time being. Such men 
are a nuisance. They make farmers and their 
families dissatisfied with the profits of ordinary 
farming. 
The Deacon says if he does not beat me with 
corn this year, he will furnish the turkey for 
Thanksgiving. Last year I beat him badly; but 
this year he has planted on the best laud on the 
farm, a two-year old clover sod, plowed with 
three horses and a jointer plow just before 
planting. Mine is drilled in on land plowed 
twice last fall, and merely cultivated this spring 
with a four-horse cultivator that Mr. Carhart 
made for me. The Deacon will do his best to 
prove that planting in hills is better than drill¬ 
ing. I think he will beat me this year, because 
he has the best land, but I will keep the cultiva¬ 
tor going, and if he cultivates no more than he 
usually does, I shall hope to get the turkey. I 
have great faith in stirring the soil, and suffering 
nothing to grow but the corn. I have one of 
Howe’s two-horse cultivators, that cultivates 
two rows at a time, and I mean to let a man 
spend as many days in the field as the Deacon 
does in his with a single cultivator. At this sea¬ 
son an extra horse does not cost much. In a dry 
season an extra cultivating is almost as good as 
a shower, and one or two thistles will pump 
as much water out of the soil as a hill of corn. 
If the Deacon will only let the grass and thistles 
grow, and we have a dry, hot season, the extra 
cultivating will make up for the difference in the 
land—and at any rate the next crop will be the 
better for it, and the clover the following year, 
will show the effect. It takes more than one crop 
to test the advantages of a system of cultivation. 
The Grass Pond Cranberry Bog—2d Art. 
[The first article was <jiven in 3faij, liar/e 178.] 
Partial Flowing in Summer, is another of 
the heresies detected at Grass Pond. The com¬ 
mon practice in the cultivated bogs is to draw 
off the water until it stands in the ditches, a foot 
or 18 inches.below the surface. This has been 
tried, and does not work well here. The water 
is kept quite high in the canal, and the. aim is to 
keep the roots of the plants constantly moist. 
We noticed as we walked over the plantation 
that the moss was moist, but not saturated- 
The bottoms of the boots were damp, but the feet 
were dry. It is claimed for this practice, that 
it complies with the natural conditions of the 
plant, and is essential to itsgreatest fruitfulness. 
We have certainly never seen so large a tract 
so thickly covered with berries. 
More Draining Needed. — We noticed 
that the best berries, the most of them, and 
the most highly colored were those which 
grew immediately upon the banks of the side 
drains. Even the hillocks left by the ditcher 
were completely overgrown with the vines; 
and heavily laden. These ditches were 200 feet 
apart, and the water stood in them perhaps 6 
inches from the surface. There was, we should 
judge, a third more fruit on any square rod next 
the drain, than on any square rod farthest 
from it. It would certainly pay, then, to put in 
the side drains 50 feet apart, instead of 200. 
The expense would be paid in the increased 
yield of a single crop. 
Picking tiie Berries is done by women and 
children, who flock in from the surrounding 
region, as fast as they are wanted. The pro¬ 
prietors have never been obliged to send away 
for this kind of help. It takes about 200 pickers 
to do up the work seasonably, beginning early 
in September. The pickers are arranged in a 
row on the edge of the vines. There is one 
overseer to 25 pickers, whose business it is to 
see that the ground is marked out, and that the 
vines are picked clean. He has stakes furnished 
with a line to each about 2 rods long, with an 
iron ring at the end weighing about a pound. 
He sticks his stake at the edge, and throws ids 
ring the length of the string into the vines. 
3 feet from the first he sticks another stake, and 
throws off the second string parallel to the first. 
This makes a plot of ground about 3 feet by 33, 
upon which the first picker enters and remains 
until it is cleaned. Each picker is served in the 
same way. She has one or more two-bushel bas¬ 
kets labeled with her name, into which the fruit 
is poured as fast as gathered. The baskets are 
transported to the packing-house by boat, or on 
carts, and there the picker is credited with the 
number of quarts found in her basket. The 
picker receives one and a half cents a quart. A 
smart picker will make $2.00 a day and upwards. 
The Curing and Packing-House. — The 
Company are now erecting a large building 
25 x 100 feet, for the purpose of curing and stor¬ 
ing the crop. It occupies the site of an old 
saw-mill, and the lower story is below the level 
of the ground upon three sides. It is made of 
heavy timber, and has a capacity to store three 
thousand or more, barrels. The curing process, 
though often neglected, is a matter of great im¬ 
portance to the middle men, who transport, 
store, and market the crop. The berries take 
