THE RUSAL NEW-YORKER. g§ 3 
when not suckling lambs, are liable to get with 
lamb any time touring the Summer; hence, it 
is never safe to leave the males with them. 
We always think it is no more trouble and a 
great deal less risk to keep the rams in a box- 
stall, where it is impossible for them to doour 
own or the neighbor’s sheep any damage. 
When thus kept up, they do not worry them¬ 
selves as they do when running out, and are 
always vigorous when the time for service 
comes, which insures strong lambs, and this 
more than pays for all the trouble in the care 
of the rams. 
Slixpp Ijitsbamiii). 
WEANING LAMBS — WHEN AND HOW 
TO DO IT. 
The common practice of allowing ewes and 
lambs to run together until taken up for Win¬ 
ter, is bad for both. While the ewe does not 
afford the three or four-months-old lamb suf¬ 
ficient nourishment to meet his wauts, she 
does afford enough to cause him to continual¬ 
ly chase her about to annoy her, and to spoil 
his appetite for other food, and the drain 
upon her system is sufficient to cause much 
loss of flesh. The proper age at which to 
separate a lamb from its dam, is wheu it is 
from 14 to 16 weeks old; but it shou'd be pre¬ 
pared for the separation by being previously 
taught to eat. Near where the sheep are wont 
to sleep, and where they should be encouraged 
to congregate, by being daily given a little 
salt; in a yard built for the purpose, or in au 
adjoining field, having the fence between, so 
arranged that the lambs alone can pass 
through, place suitable troughs, which may 
be made by nailing together, V shaped, two 
boards six inches wide, with ends nailed in, 
which troughs are placed on legs so as 
to raise them about six inches from the 
ground. Into these put daily a little oats, 
corn, brau, oil-meal, or u mixture of any 
or all of these, so that tbo lambs will acquire 
a taste for them; in two weeks they will have 
learned to eat, and will be ready for separa¬ 
tion. They should now l>o put into a field of 
fresh grass, where they can have plenty of 
good drinking water, and should have the 
grain i ation continued in sufficient quantity 
to keep up a constant growth. The ewes and 
lambs should be placed so far apart that they 
cannot, hear each other bleat,, and the lambs, 
if at all wild, should have one or two very 
tame, dry ewes put with them, that they may 
the sooner become accustomed to the presence 
of the feeder. The ewes, for n few days, should 
be put on rather poor feed, and be occasion¬ 
ally looked after, and, if necessary milked, 
that they do not suffer with inilamed udders, 
and perhaps the loss of tho whole or a part. 
After this, they should be carefully sorted, 
and uoue but the best retained for future 
breeding. The remainder should receive ex¬ 
tra feed to bo hurried into condition for mar¬ 
ket, The breeding ewes should lie given good 
pasture, so they may become in good 
flesh before cold weather, and should, at no 
time, be allowed to full away. The moment 
they are allowed to do so, the growth of wool 
ceases, or becomes of very uneven and iuferior 
quulity. With the present prices of meat and 
wool, sheep can lie kept at a profit, only by the 
exercise of the utmost vigilance, to see that 
every requirement is met to insure the largest 
production of meat and wool of the finest 
quality, at the lowest possible cost for food, 
and to do this they must at no time be allowed 
to go back or fall away in flesh. 
HANDLING FRUITS. 
E. P. POWELL. 
There is hardly a farm in whole States, on 
which more or less fruit is not raised for 
market, but in the majority of cases the 
fruit is ignorantly handled and so far as cul¬ 
tivation is concerned is left to shift for itself. 
1 have looked over a crop of apples 
gathered so as to be unmarketable at any pay¬ 
ing price; for it costs nearly as much to pick 
apples badly as it does to pick them carefully. 
This lot of apples was tumbled into the bar¬ 
rels, leaves, twigs, poor and good fruit, all to¬ 
gether Yet for the season, the apples if prop¬ 
erly handled and sorted were far above the 
average. Heavy dealers complain that farm¬ 
ers will cheat in packing apples. Possibly a 
part of the difficulty is dishonesty, but the 
bulk of the difficulty seems to be lack of care 
and thrift, and what you may call civiliza¬ 
tion, lor if you look about a farm where 
fruit is badly handled, you find everything 
else badly handled. Tools are out of repair, 
and animals wild; only, a hog once scalded 
and cut up, does not show the neglect like a 
barrel of fruit. 
The fact is fruit-raising is a very nice piece 
of work. The old-fashioned orchards of cider 
aud pie-apples were simply shaken aud beat¬ 
en to denude them of fruit, aud neither need¬ 
ed nor reeei ved special care, Au orchard of 
Baldwins must have the nice care required in 
the butter room. The fruit should be han¬ 
dled like eggs from the picking to the final 
consumption. It is but little more labor to 
lay them down into the basket than it is to 
drop them in. The least bruise of one cell, is 
the liegiuning of decay. Some varieties will 
heal up the sore, but some will not. They 
should t hen be sorted by handling, not pour¬ 
ing and tossing; then laid, not tumbled, into 
bins or barrels. Apples when picked should 
at once be placed, after thorough sorting, in 
a cool, well-ventilated room or cellar, not left 
in piles on the ground. But the trouble with 
fruitis far more with the brokers and com¬ 
mission men than with the farmers. Apples 
received are tumbled about, and poured fiom 
barrel into barrel unmercifully. By the time 
a retailer has jiossessiou of fruit it is mori¬ 
bund. It must be hurried to the consumer; 
and what sad-lookiug stuff goes out by the 
peck to the family consumer. 
I have repeatedly said to a store purchaser 
as he seized on a load of fruit by the bauds of 
headlong clerks, and poured ripe D’Anjous or 
Onondagas into baskets: “Sir, you hurt me 
when you tumble fruit about so. I have care¬ 
fully handled those pears and brought them 
to ycu in first-class order. You have ruined 
them in one minute; and you will loso your 
best profits and lay it to me. 1 * The profits of 
fruitdealers are mostly in the gutters and gar¬ 
bage barrels. “How much do you throw 
away in a week/” I asked ono denier. “Can’t 
toll, can’t tell. A great deal. There’s six 
barrels of waste, if all right, worth or #J50. 
That is only a drop, however.” Then he 
caught a basket of Hash ripe fruit and gave it 
a rattling pour, and l concluded he deserved 
to lose all that he did lose, and more too 
The dishonesty runs along with the stupid 
ignorauce all through tho trade. The con¬ 
sumer at last has the worst of it. “ I want you 
to go into my cellar,” said a city friend, “ and 
sec some apples I have bought.” He had a 
barrel of Spys, but among them were a good 
many red, sweet apples of about the same size 
as the average Spy. But the barrel was in 
reality a menagerie of all sorts of things, and 
rapidly undergoing decomposition. Two lay¬ 
ers of fine Bpys had heen found at each end 
of tho barrel, hugging between them the 
trash. I told him the buyers or middlemen 
required those layers and would not accept a 
barrel without them. It used to be ono layer, 
it is uow two. It is a temptation to the vexed 
farmer to make up, by dumping anything into 
the middle. 
The remedy will come probably by the 
ultimate prominence given to certain brand-tof 
fruit, an honest man’s name guaranteeing 
sale, precisely as flour has its place in tho 
market, or cloth. Any one buying a barrel 
of Yeoman's Sockets knows what he is get¬ 
ting. So any one going into Arnold & Con¬ 
stable's stores knows that their reputation for 
absolute honesty is worth more to them than a 
trifling gain through misrepresentation. 
The fruit growers meet of course with se¬ 
rious difficulty iu establishing and sustaining 
such a brand; for if all other binderancos were 
overcome, it is exceedingly difficult to secure 
pickers who will obey orders about handling. 
It is a predominant conviction among “bands,” 
that brains are not needed in gathering fruit. 
There is little education on the subject; and 
our laboring people have a long road to go 
over to get the judgment and care needed; 
their chief idea is hurry, to get the work done, 
and in most cases the employer goads them on. 
Oneida Co., N. Y. 
Clapp’s Favorite this year ripens earlier 
than usual. The trees are loaded with fine 
fruit, but the quality is poor—scarcely better 
than that of the Le Conle, specimens of which 
were received from Georgia about August 14. 
An objection to the Clapp’s Favorite is that it 
npens all at once, so to speak, and then decays 
all at once. 
SORGHUM; 
ITS GROWTH AND THE MANUFACTURE OF 
SUGAR AND SIRUP—THE WHOLE STORY.— VI. 
PROF. H. W. WILEY. 
SUGAR. 
You ask me to tell your readers “ how to 
make sugar in the simplest way ” Alas! I 
fear there is no “simplest way.” To make 
sugar from sorghum, profitably, takes all the 
science that modern chemistry can offer, and 
all the skill that the practical man and ma¬ 
chinist can com maud. If I am unable to point 
out a “short cut” to sugar-making, I at least 
may be able to explain the nature of the diffi¬ 
culties which lie in the way of this desirable 
consummation. 
NATURE OF THE SUGAR IN SORGHUM. 
The groat, obstacle which prevents every 
Northern farmer from being his own sugar 
maker, is tho presence in sorghum juices of a 
sugar which is not crystallizable. This sugar, 
in common with that derived from corn starch, 
is called glucose, although the two are entirely 
different in their uature. The ordinary erys 
tallized sugar of commerce, derived from tho 
tropical enno aud the sugar beet, is, on the 
other hand, known as sucrose. Sucrose aiul 
glucose both exist in sorghum, aud in propor¬ 
tions which depend on various conditions. In 
the unripe cane tho proportion of glucose to 
sucrose is always greater than when the cane 
is ripe. But in the ripe cane the proportion 
also varies, often from causes which are not 
apparent. In carefully selected ripe canes the 
quantity of sucrose has been found six times as 
great as that of glucose. Tho average atqount 
of glucose iu ripe canes, however, is much 
larger. My own experience, extending over 
a period of several years, and bused on sev¬ 
eral thousand analyses, shows that in ripe 
sorghum canes, taken by the quantity,the pro¬ 
portion of glucose to sucrose, is not loss than 
one to three. In cane juice, therefore, con¬ 
taining 13 per cent, of total sugar, there will 
bo nine per cent of sucrose, and three cent, of 
glucose. Glucose makes just ns good sirup 
as sucrose, and perhaps a little better. Sirup 
could not bo made from pure sucrose uuless 
a portiou of it, sufficient to prevrut crystallize 
tlon, were first converted intoglucose. Glucose 
is called uncrystal I izable sugifr, although some 
forms of it, as that made from starch and 
that present iu honey, etc., do readily crys¬ 
tallize. That which is present iu sorghum, 
however, has no tendency to form crystals, 
and, what is worse, it holds a certain quantity 
of sucrose in solution, and thus prevents it 
from crystallizing. It is generally stated that 
the glucose of sorghum will keep an equal 
quantity of sucrose from crystallizing, aud 
this is under, rather than over the truth. 
What happens, then, in a juice such as is 
described above/ The three per cent, of glu- 
cose keeps three per cent, of sucrose in solu¬ 
tion, so that of the nine percent of sucrose, 
only six are available; but the wliolo of the 
tale is not yet told: When tho best processes 
of defecation are used, the whole of the “non- 
sugars” in the juice is not removed; tho 
starch, the gum, the soluble mineral salts, in¬ 
cluding a part of tho added lime, are loft m 
solution, aud these act on crystallization like 
glucose, only in a higher degree; and thus 
another largo part of the sucrose is kept from 
crystallizing. Add this to tho first, and we 
find scarcely more than half of tho sucrose 
available. 
There is still another chapter of misfor¬ 
tunes: when sorghum juices are evaporated 
in open pans, the temperature constantly 
rises as the condensation proceeds, until, at the 
time the mass is ready for removal from the 
pans, the temperature is higher by many de¬ 
grees than at the beginning. This high and 
prolonged temperature acts on the sucrose and 
converts it, first into glucose, and if contin¬ 
ued, into caromel. Thus, by the time we have 
our product ready to sot aside fur crystalliza¬ 
tion, there is not much left for crystals. Some¬ 
times, it is true, the sucrose escapes all the 
viscissitudes aud, like a veritable saccharine 
“Mark Tapley,” comes up smiling at the end; 
but this is not the usual result. And even 
should crystals be formed, and the manufac¬ 
turer have a small centrifugal to separate 
them from the molasses, ho will find, at last, 
that he has only secured “raw sugar,” and 
that this will have to go through a further 
process of refining before it can compare with 
the pure sugars of commerce. 1 do not men¬ 
tion these difficulties to discourage attempts 
to make sugar profitably in a small way. No 
one would more heartily rejoice iu the success 
of such an enterprise than myself, and I would 
allow no one to be more eager to help it on. 
But you asked me, in writing this story to 
state the truth, and candor compels me to ad¬ 
mit that there is no immediate prospect of 
the small sugar farmer becoming a possi¬ 
bility. 
Successful sugar making requires tho evap¬ 
oration of the saccharine juice In vacuo, and 
vacuum pans must be largo and expensive, 
and therefore beyond the means of the small 
farmer. For the present, therefore, be not 
deluded with false dreams of home-made 
sorghum sugar; but cling to the reality of 
good home-made sorghum sirup. 
IMPORTANCE OF CLEAN SEED. 
How many of the readers of the Rural 
New-Yorker sow, or plant only pure seeds 
of the different farm crops grown by them? 
Iu other words, bow mauy of the farmers 
who read the Rural New-Yorker, strive 
to procure clean, well matured seed, aud 
will sow nothing else? Brother fanner, have 
you seriously thought of the losses that yearly 
accrue to every one who sows impure or foul 
seed on his form? And, if so, have you striven 
to avoid such losses by sowing only those, clean 
and selected, of the various kinds? If you have, 
you are doubtless on the rood to su cess; if 
uot, please stop and ttiink befc re you sow your 
full crop of wheat, or rye: examine the 
seed you propose to sow, aud see if it is satis- 
fuetory; if so, and it is such tvs pleases you, 
sow it on well prepared soil, expecting to reap 
good, cleau grain at the next harvest. If the 
seed is foul with cockle, chess, or other foul 
seeds, do not sow it; if you do, the crop will 
disappoint you when harvested. Tho writer 
has tried both methods; sowing such seed 
wheat us fanners frequently use, the seed was 
uot clean, and the crop was no cleaner thau 
the seed. Uo has also tried sowing clean seed, 
and been successful in raising clean wheat at 
tho harvesting of the crop. 
.Should all farmers adopt tho rulu to sow 
only clean wheat, it would show in the wheat 
fields at harvest time. Rye, chess, and 
cockle would soon disappear from tho wheat 
field, rye would be growu only by itself, uot as 
a mixture in tho wheat, and cockle and chess 
would disappear entirely from our farms. 
I am glad to write that farmers are paying 
more attention to seed grain, and especially 
wheat, in this vicinity, than was tho custom a 
few years since, and better crops are now 
raised in consequence of tho care taken to 
have it cleaner from chess and cockle. Still 
there aro instances where It will pay the funn¬ 
er to dean his wheat even better than is uow 
done; and now, just before seeding, is a good 
time to look about and see what can be done 
by way of improvement in the selection and 
cleaning of the seed that is to bo used, in order 
to have a good crop of nice, cleau grain at tho 
uoxt harvest. But little wheat is grown iu 
this dairy section; therefore there is the 
more reason that extra care bo taken to use 
only dean seed. Where a small piece is sown 
for family use only, we certainly want to 
raise dean wheat that shall make tho best of 
(lour. It will pay the large wheat grower 
equally well to select only clean, well matur¬ 
ed seed to sow his extensive fields. If all 
farmers would take capteial paint, with their 
seed wheat to see that it was absolutely clean, 
cockle and chess would rapidly disappear 
from our farms, to tho benefit of both pro¬ 
ducer and consumer in the increased amount 
of wheat raised, aud tho better quality of flour 
produced. The bettor quality of wheat would 
secure a better price and a very much increas¬ 
ed profit! 
Brother farmers, you cannot bo too careful 
of what you sow. J, Talcott 
Rome, N. Y. 
POTATOES “MIXING.” 
In several late issues of the Rural articles 
have appeared questioning the possibility of 
potatoes “mixing.” They do “mix;” but the 
“mixing” always takes place in tho cellar— 
never in the hill. The explanation given in 
the issue of August 16, may be satisfactory 
ton majority of readers, but them ore always 
those who want to see before they will believe. 
To such I would suggest the following experi¬ 
ment, and all doubts will be swept away. 
Take two potatoes of different varieties hav¬ 
ing form, color, eyes, differing us widely as 
possible—While Star and Peaohblow, for in¬ 
stance. Destroy all eyes, save two in each, 
Plant tho tubers withiuan inch of each other.’ 
and insert a segar-boxlid between them. Select 
tbo rankest vines of each,and destroy the other 
by giving it u quick jerk. This will take the 
eye with it and prevent resproutiug. As soon 
as either vine is stout enough, insert a table- 
fork, lengthwise, and by a sudden twist of the 
prongs, split the vine. With the rough edgo 
of a piece of glass scrape the Opposite sides of 
the other vine. Insert this vine in tho slit of 
the other in such a manner that the raw sides 
come In contact with each other; bind them 
together with a broad piece of muslin. In 
nine cases out of ten, both vines will grow. I f 
there is any "mixing” in tho hill, this treat¬ 
ment should “mix” them, and yet each vine 
will produce its kind, t have never found 
the slightest trace of mixture in color, or form 
of eye. Potatoes so raised and planted tho 
next year invariably produced their kind. I 
have never seen a ball grow on vines so 
treated. e a p 
— » ♦ ♦- 
Try the Armstrong or Lambeth, Finley, 
German Amber and Champion Amber 
Wheats in small plots. 
The Jirst number in Nrsvember, or there- 
' abouts, will, be the largest edition ever pub- 
| linked of the Rural New-Yorker. It will 
give a full account of our Free Seed Distribu 
tion. 
