6i8 
AUG. 22 
Poultry Yard. 
A SUMMER POULTRY TALK. 
Some good small flocks; small breeds are 
big layers; cutting effects of crushed 
glass; home-made tools; shelter good 
for chickens. 
On March 29, 1S9L, Rev. J Roberts, of 
Freeville, N. Y., purchased 12 White Leg¬ 
horn hens and a rooster. They were con¬ 
fined to a small yard and all the food was 
bought, and consisted of wheat bran, oats 
and cracked corn. 
STATEMENT. 
DR. CR. 
18 head, at Hta $10 40 35 doz eggs, at 15c...$5 25 
Feed, smonths. 4 80 2' *■ •• 25c... 5 25 
- 86 chicks, at 20c.7 20 
$15 20 - 
$17 70 
A balance of $2.50 and the flock in three 
months. 
The Rev. J. Barton French, of Trumans- 
burg, N. Y., has 20 Black Mlnorcts The 
cost for feed is 50 cents per week. They are 
confined to the hen yard, and are fed oyster 
shells, some green food, table scraps, and a 
grain ration consisting of three parts wheat 
and three parts oat meal. They are year¬ 
lings with the exception of one four-year- 
old. They have averaged 100 eggs per week 
for many weeks. For two weeks in May 
they laid 208 eggs. He supposed the old 
hen would stop laying or sit, but up to 
date she was still at it. 
Geo E. Gasper, Geneva, N. Y., has several 
hundred hens. In connection with fruit 
and market gardening he grows a few hun¬ 
dred broilers. The hens are fed cooked 
food, which is collected each morning from 
hotels and private houses. The cost is 
practically nothing, as the work takes but 
a little of the time of a boy and horse which 
are kept to work in the gardens. His cus¬ 
tomers can hardly wait till the chickens 
weigh a pound and a half each and cheer¬ 
fully pay 40 cents per pound. He has had 
remarkable success witn his “ Perfect 
Hatcher,” averaging 75 to 90 per cent of 
chicks from all fertile eggs. “The trouble 
is with the eggs not with the incubators,” 
said he. “Keep the hens healthy, give 
them plenty of exercise, and have plenty of 
males. Keep them well supplied with meat, 
shells and nitrogenous foods.” The chicks 
are kept in large brooder houses which are 
warmed by tanks of hot water both over 
and under the floors. 
His feed is a brown bread ration which is 
baked in large pans. 
In the poultry department at the Geneva 
Experiment Farm, Prof. Wheeler has some 
fine chicks which are fed milk, ground 
glass and a ration of corn meal, bran, oil 
meal, meat and whole grain. A record of 
the number of eggs laid by hens of different 
breeds, selected for that purpose for their 
shape, is being kept. Chickens will be 
reared from the mobt prolific hens, and an 
effort will be made to breed “laying hens.” 
A friend who invested in crushed glass 
for laying hens, found, after feeding it a 
few day8, a sick pullet. Dissection showed 
the inside of the crop stuck lull of bits of 
glass. A second, and in a few days, a third 
died, and tae glass was taken out. He is 
not a very enthusiastic advocate of glass 
for “ grit.” There is nothing better than 
good, white, ground oyster shells for grit 
and shell material. 
A. G. Chapman, Groton, N. Y., has 300 
hens. From January 1 to June 1, 1891, the 
receipts for eggs were $285. In the same 
time the receipts from 11 cows were $250 
for butter. Which gave the most profit 
for the feed consumed ? He has a home¬ 
made incubator and gets very fair hatches 
—probably 50 to 80 per cent. His brooders 
are also “ home invented.” The top floor 
projects out over the lower chambers so as 
to avoid too much bottom heat, the lamp 
heat coming in contact with the center half 
of the brooder only. Five hundred White 
Leghorn chicks—four hatches—are confined 
to yard and brooder by sections of lath 
fence, which are light, cheap and easily 
made. Four of them form a square and are 
held together by a cord. When the grass 
gets foul the “ yard ” is readily moved to 
other parts of the place. About 100 birds 
are kept in each yard with fine gravel from 
the road. Charcoal and millet are mixed 
for the chickens to work in. Scalded food 
made of bran, corn meal, ground bone, 
milk and ground oats and baked brown 
bread, is fed. Cracked wheat, oat flakes and 
oyster shells are supplied. The outlook for 
high-priced eggs this fall is very promising. 
There is no money in keeping a chicken till 
a year old before getting any returns. The 
chickens, on many farms, when the size of 
robins are thought to be large enough to 
take care of themselves. Being jammed 
about by the old hens and half starved, 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER. 
they fail to make tuffieient growth before 
cold weather. They should have a yard by 
themselves and be liberally fed, so as to 
begin laying in October. 
I had some very smart Brown Leghorn 
week-old chicks. When fed at night they 
seemed all right, but next morning six were 
dead. After a good deal of study I opened 
them and found a kernel of Western corn in 
the gizzard of each, which was completely 
filled. The corn had been fed to the hen 
the day before and it did not seem possible 
for the chicks to swallow any, but they did 
and it was too much for them, swelling 
and souring before being digested. 
Yesterday was wet and cold. A flock of 
100 little fellows had to be shut in the 
brooder all day and this morning they had 
that “drooping of the wing,” miserable, 
woe begone look, which makes the owner 
feel sick too. The wind blew cold and the 
sun shone only a part of the time. They 
needed to get out but to let them was risky 
—a little too much damp or chill and one 
can get his incubator ready for another lot. 
Not much variation is allowed in this busi¬ 
ness without disastrous results. 
While leaning on the lath fence the 
thought occurred, “keep out the wind.” I 
immediately got some heavy brown build¬ 
ing paper and tacked a two-foot strip on the 
inside of the fence all the way around, hold¬ 
ing it in place by strips of lath. I suppose 
muslin would be more durable. Behind 
this wind-break the chicks were soon eDjny- 
ing their liberty and to night are lively as 
crickets. C. E. chapman. 
Cleaning Out The Poultry House. 
The work most dreaded by those who keep 
poultry is cleaning out the poultry house, 
and as it should be done at least once a 
day in summer, those who are busy at 
some other occupation are not willing to 
bestow the necessary labor, and conse. 
quently neglect the work to a certain ex¬ 
tent, thus inviting lice, which entail more 
labor, while the hens, being tormented by 
the pests, fail to lay, and the result is that 
they become unprofitable. 
Much of this trouble may be avoided by 
the use of board floors, which also protect 
the fowls from dampness in winter. With 
such floors the cleaning out of the poultry 
house becomes an easy matter, only the 
sweeping of the floor with an old broom 
being necessary. To do this, go to the 
poultry house in the morning, taking a pail 
of dry earth with you. Carefully sweep 
off the floor, remove the accumulations, and 
then scatter the dry dust over the floor, 
placing the larger portion under the roosts. 
Do not be afraid to throw or scatter it over 
the nests, walls, or any other portion of 
the house, as lice do not relish dry earth, 
and if you prefer to use sifted coal ashes so 
much the better. The next morning, when 
you begin to sweep, you will find no diffi¬ 
culty, as you sweep the droppings away 
with the dust, and they will not stick to the 
floor. The work can be done as quickly as 
the sweeping of an eq ual area of the floor of 
the dwelling-house. 
If you do not care for the droppings, you 
may use fine air slaked lime freely occasion¬ 
ally, in place of the dust, as It will cause 
lice to scamper away rapidly, and will 
greatly aid in destroying disease germs. If 
preferred, a handful may be mixed with 
the dry earth or dust. But when you use 
a board floor do not forget that it provides 
a secure harboring place for rats, hence 
have half-inch wire around the edge of the 
house, extending into the ground, and have 
the boards of the floor removable. P. H. J. 
A Mighty Plague of Mites. 
Will some of your many correspondents 
tell me how to rid my premises and 
fowls of those terrible pests, mites. I 
keep but a few fowls, mostly for home 
use, but these pe3ts have come in so that I 
cannot bear to go near them or their quar¬ 
ters, for these mites get on us so thickly as 
sometimes to compel us to change our 
clothing and wash in kerosene oil, which 
drives them away, but we dare not apply it 
to the fowls. Would it do any permanent 
good to spray the buildings with the oil ? 
W. Cornwall, Vt. A. D. 
Ans.— First read the article on page 571. 
Your house evidently requires “heroic” 
treatment—cure not prevention. Clean it 
out thoroughly; then spray every inch of 
the inside with kerosene. After the place 
has been well aired, wash out thoroughly 
with boiling water, “swabbing” it with a 
broom or mop into every crack and corner. 
Then whitewash the inside with a wash in 
which a little carbolic acid has been stirred. 
Rub the roosts with kerosene. Dust the 
hens with pyrtthrum or “ insect powder.” 
Then keep the place clean and spray the 
inside with kerosene every two weeks until 
it is certain that all the ineects have been 
killed. The cleaning of such a hen house is 
about the meanest job on the farm—it will 
make your flesh “crawl” for days. It must 
be done sooner or later, however, or the 
house must be burned down ! 
SOME ROUMANIAN FARMING. 
Wheat and Corn Crowing. 
In my last letter I said it was no rare 
sight to see 500 reapers in one field cutting 
grain, and of these two-thirds would be 
women and children from eight years old 
upward. The reason of this is that 
the natural born Roumanian workman is 
of a very lazy disposition, and will not 
work unless compelled to do so by hunger 
or some other imperative stimulant; con¬ 
sequently he sends his wife and children to 
do the work and he remains at home, to 
sleep or to do nothing. On this account 
we foreigners are always found at the 
head of all works conducted in Roumania. 
If the soil of Roumania were worked as 
scientifically as is that of the United States 
and similar countries, the yieldgwould 
be large. For example, while the Ameri¬ 
can farmers plow their ground for fall 
wheat three times, and also manure it, we, 
on the contrary, only plow the ground In 
the spring, or sometimes in the fall. When 
we plow in the spring we sow corn broad¬ 
cast like wheat, and when it grows to be 
about six inches high, then we send the 
laborers with hoes and cut out all the corn 
where it has grown too thickly, and hoe 
the remainder. It is not in rows, however, 
but each stalk is about two feet from the 
next all over the whole field. In one season 
the corn is hoed twice. One may well 
imagine how many women, children and 
men are required for this hoeiDg of corn 
where the farms, one with another, com¬ 
prise about 15,000 acres apiece under the 
crop, all to be planted and hoed by hand. 
The poor population, however, is so dense 
that labor can be found quite easily. 
Then, about August 25, we commence to 
sow our fall wheat among the corn. When 
we begin to sow we tend out perhaps 20 
Roumanians who are kept on purpose for 
sowing wheat, and they go into the corn, 
(Continued on next page.) 
How to Multiply Plants. 
How to Graft. 
How to Bud. 
How to Seed. 
How to Inarch. 
How to Increase by Cuttings. 
How to Increase by Layers. 
Howto Increase by Separation. 
How to Hybridize. 
How to Produce New Varieties. 
How to Propagate over 2,000 
varieties of shrubs, trees and her¬ 
baceous or soft-stemmed plants: the 
process for each being fully described. 
All this and much more is 
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