77o 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER. 
NOV 23 
thoroughly we have conquered these pests, 
that this year, wanting the granary to store 
early potatoes in, I put up a car-load of wheat 
in bags and piled them up in our covered 
manure shed, where they stood for weeks 
entirely uninjured. This alone was worth 
more to us than the cost of keeping the cats 
for years. Rats and mice never did us any 
very great injury; but in some way or 
other it always seemed that when they 
were running, we hadn’t quite got that “ do¬ 
minion ” of which Prof. Roberts spoke so 
grandly in a late number of the R. N.-Y. 
They are rather small game; but neverthe¬ 
less I have enjoyed getting the upper hand 
of them. 
Hudson, Ohio. 
FROM A. L. CROSBY. 
I suppose these may be called the weeds 
of the buildings, and are as useful in their 
way as the weeds of the field, that is, they 
help us to realize that we live in a vale of 
tears. If we could only farm without 
weeds 
The only remedies I know of for rats and 
mice are cats, dogs, poisons and traps. 
Poisons I never use ; cats and dogs I always 
keep a supply of, and when the rats get 
very numerous I set traps, but after catch¬ 
ing a dozen or so, no more will enter the 
traps for a long time. But I have noticed 
that there seemed to be a smaller number 
about than the proportion caught would 
account for, and I am under the impression 
that they emigrate to some neighbor, and 
my belief is helped by the fact that some¬ 
times there seems to be a sudden large 
increase in the number of rats about the 
buildings, I suppose because one of my 
neighbors has been warring with them, and 
they have left him in a body. 
I read once of an easy plan to get rid of 
rats ; it was to catch one alive, paint him 
red and then turn him loose; it was said he 
would drive all the rest away. I set a trap 
and after weeks of waiting, caught one, 
and painted him red and let him go, “ his 
native freedom to enjoy.” That night he 
went back into the trap. I am convinced 
that there is no easy way of getting rid of 
these rodents. 
If I thrash my grain soon after harvest 
and husk the corn before winter, rats do 
not do me much damage as I can keep them 
out of the granary and corn house, but the 
mice are hard to get even with, as they can 
live on so little and do so much damage at 
the same time. They cannot be scared like 
rats; catching them in traps doesn’t seem 
to make much impression on their number, 
and though the cats and dogs kill a great 
many, yet there always have been plenty 
of mice and I am afraid always will be. 
The damage mice do is in “ littles,” but 
it counts up in the course of a year. Gnaw¬ 
ing holes in grain bags and bins, cutting 
the bands of grain sheaves, fouling the 
grain, cutting holes in shingle roofs, des¬ 
troying samples of choice seeds that have 
been “carefully” put away, committing 
suicide in pails of cream and in various 
other ways reminding us that they are 
doing their work faithfully and thoroughly 
while we occasionally jam a corn-cob in a 
mouse hole, and wonder what mice were 
made for anyhow. 
Catonsville, Md. 
FROM H. A. MARCH. 
“Rats in the granary, rats in the barn, 
rats in the chicken-houses; rats all over the 
farm.” There is no pest that can equal the 
long-tailed rodent for malicious meanness 
here on Puget Sound—no not even the hea¬ 
then Chinee, for the Chinaman takes only 
what he can make use of, while I have had 
rats gnaw into my brooders and kill 50 fine 
broilers of a night and they did not eat half 
of one. I carry on an extensive chicken 
ranch in connection with cauliflower-seed 
raising. I raise from 1,000 to 1,500 chickens 
each year, and keep from 500 to 800 laying 
hens in 15 houses, and, of course, use large 
quantities of grain and ground feed, the 
odor of which, with that of the poultry, 
brings the rats from the woods and from 
all the neighbors’ places to mine, especially 
in a cold snap in the winter or a very dry. 
time when feed is short in the pastures, for 
the pests will feed on clover and get fat 
like so many woodchucks. Then we are 
fairly overrun with them. They become 
so bold that they will carry off young 
chickens in the day-time and attack the 
hens in the coops. But the worst trouble 
they cause me is by getting into my under¬ 
drains. We have no tile here for draining, 
so have to use cedar bolts, which are laid on 
rails and answer a very good purpose, as 
they are very lasting, (some that have been 
down over 30 years are still doing good 
work). Now the rats will enter the drains 
where they empty on the beach, travel up a 
distance, gnaw through the planking, and 
dig out to the surface, of course, filling the 
drain with earth and necessitating the 
opening of it sometimes in a dozen places 
in 100 yards. Trapping does no good. Ten 
men with a dozen traps each would hardly 
make a showing; it would amount to about 
as much as trapping rabbits in Australia. 
“ Rough on Rats” the pests won’t touch. 
I have baited them for three or four days 
with meal, and then put Rough on Rats in 
the dish, and it would stand until it was 
decayed, and not a rat would touch it. 
Strychnine is the only thing that wdll 
fetch the pests every time, and this is the 
way I use it: 
I take four quarts of wheat, put it into a 
kettle kept for that purpose and into no 
other; cover it about an inch with water, 
set it on a fire to heat. Now r take half of a 
bottle of strychnia or one-sixteentli of an 
ounce, put it in a cup wuth a couple of 
spoonfuls of vinegar which will dissolve it, 
now mix it with the wheat and water and 
bring it to a boil (stay with it, you can’t be 
too careful), every little while stir it up as 
the wheat swells and softens; keep on stir¬ 
ring until the water is all absorbed by the 
wheat,then it’s ready for business; after 
taking it off the fire while it is yet moist, 
take a large handful of brown sugar and stir 
it into the mass. This removes the bitter 
taste of the strychnia and gives it a ginger¬ 
bread odor that will fetch them from long 
distances. To feed the wheat and make it 
safe, take a box about the size of a soap 
box; saw out a hole about the size of a 
rat hole on each end and the sides; now un¬ 
der the box set a quart pan w r ith the pois¬ 
oned wheat in it; lay a flat stone on the 
box and the thing is done. I put the boxes 
under the barn, pig-sty or chicken house ; 
in fact, in any place w T here*they will be 
safe from children, pigs and chickens. And 
now, brother farmers, if you are going to 
poison rats let me tell you, do it yourself. 
Don’t trust it to the hired man, or to the 
boys; but go right at it yourself, and be 
sure you put the poison where you know 
that it will be safe from “little hands” and 
all domestic animals. 
Fidalgo, Washington. 
FROM GEORGE DORM IRE. 
Rats do not trouble my house, I guarded 
against them when I built it. I also in¬ 
tended that the house should be mouse- 
proof, but in this I failed. Mice are giving 
us a little trouble in the dwelling-house 
and in the barn and other outbuildings 
they are having full sway and are quite 
troublesome. The best way to prevent the 
ravages of mice and young rats is to keep 
their numbers reduced as much as possible 
by means of self-setting traps and good 
cats. A good cat is the best trap in ex¬ 
istence. She is the natural enemy of mice 
and their certain destroyer, and it is much 
cheaper for me to feed a few cats than it is 
to feed the mice, to say nothing of the 
annoyance from them. But with grown 
rats the case is different. It is seldom that 
a cat will attack a full-grown rat, and it 
seems that the flesh of rats is not whole¬ 
some food for cats. My experience has 
taught me that any continued and persis¬ 
tent warfare against the pests is the best 
means of getting rid of them, or of keeping 
their numbers reduced, and the best mode 
of fighting them is by the use of a good 
rat-terrier and a gun or revolver. Rats 
are extremely averse to be made targets of 
in shooting, but that is risky business 
about a bam. I do not think that the 
pests are more numerous or troublesome 
than they used to be. They are quite nu¬ 
merous and troublesome at times, and then 
again there will be but a few. In grain 
crops they damage our corn mostly by 
shelling it and eating the hearts out of the 
kernels, and unless we have a tight floor in 
our cribs the corn so shelled is likely to go 
to waste. They are also damaging the 
foundation walls under the barns and out¬ 
buildings by burrowing under them, thus 
causing them to fall down or otherwise 
weakening them. 
Carysville, Ohio. 
FROM R. BRODIE. 
Living, as w T e do. a few minutes’ walk 
from the city, we are troubled more by rats 
than farmers who live farther in the coun¬ 
try. In winter they take refuge in the hot 
manure that is carted into the fields from 
the city, and in summer I have even cut 
them with the mowing machine in cutting 
hay. In my barn my grain and feed bins 
are lined with sheet-iron, but it is harder to 
keep them from burrowdng under the foun¬ 
dation of the root cellar. 1 have filled their 
holes with broken glass, but they make 
other holes alongside. If building again, I 
would get the footing stone laid in cement 
and part of the floor also. Mice are much 
more easily trapped than rats, the latter 
being much more cunning. I have tried 
poisoning with a phosphorus preparation ; 
but I would rather stand the living mice 
and rats than the smell of dead ones in the 
house. In the barn, however, it did fairly 
well till they looked on it with suspicion 
and fought shy of it. 
The best way to fight them is to have a 
good cat or two and a couple of good dogs. 
I have a terrier and a Collie dog, both good 
ratters ; but the cats are the best for the 
house as they will not chew up the wood¬ 
work as the dogs do. Unfortunately the 
neighbor’s dog killed my pussies; since 
then the mice have been increasing. Our 
girl caught 11 in a trap yesterday. The 
dogs are the best for keeping dowi) the rats 
about the barn and on the farm. They will 
hunt them out from under the stable and 
barn floors and not give them a chance to 
make nests. No farmer should be without 
a Collie to care for the cattle and a Scotch 
terrier or a fox terrier to guard against 
rats and mice. Where the rats caused me 
most damage was in a root cellar under our 
barn. The pests found their way under 
the floor into the cellar; the holes they 
made let in the frost which did a w r orld of 
injury in addition to the amount of stuff 
the nuisances destroyed, and the dogs 
could not find their way through the closed 
doors into the cellar. I intend building a 
root cellar away from the other buildings. 
I have not seen a rat about my buildings 
this season, but I come across an occasional 
dead one in the fields and orchards,«that the 
dogs have killed. When I was young my 
father used to give us a penny a rat for all 
we w r ere able to trap. It was great sport. 
St. Henry of Montreal, Canada. 
FROM C. C. WARREN. 
We are not troubled with mice or rats 
about the house as we keep two cats, but 
we have only the small w r oods rats to con¬ 
tend with. Those big imported fellow r s 
that sit up on end, waving their tails like 
banners in the air and which can put an 
ordinary cat to flight, have not yet made 
their advent here and I am not anxious for 
any of their company about the barn and 
corn-crib. I sometimes use poison to keep 
down those small rats, but am not troubled 
much by them. About the only damage 
they do is to eat a little corn. 
Grand Bay, Ala. 
The Vitis Californiea, which is being 
used for a resistant stock on w T hich to graft 
many varieties, is one of the most pictur¬ 
esque and beautiful objects on the Califor¬ 
nia river bottoms and in the ravines. Very 
few writers have spoken of it, and very few' 
tourists ever get a glimpse of the grape in 
its native haunts, because it is seldom seen 
in the cultivated valleys or near the high 
ways of travel. It grows on the Lagunitas, 
the Alameda, the Sonoma, and the Sacra¬ 
mento, along the Salinas, San Joaquin and 
Russian Rivers. It is at its best in central 
and northern California. One of the most 
beautiful examples of wild-grape arbors in 
the State is to be seen along the Rio Linda 
and Chico Creex, on Gen. Bidwell’s farm in 
Butte County. Here, for 15 miles the trees 
on the banks are covered wnth grape-vines, 
in vast domes, spires, arches, arbors and 
columns. The illustration seen at Figure 
280, shows but tw T o out of thousands of 
forms w’hich these magnificent vines have 
taken in their superb luxuriance of growth. 
They creep up banks and cover piles of 
stone and ledges of rock. They cross from 
tree to tree, in leafy bridges. When in 
bloom they scent the air for miles. In au¬ 
tumn so abundant are the small, purple 
clusters that they seem to color the whole 
forest. After the leaves and fruit have 
fallen, the vines are still worth admiring 
study, for they reveal their labyrinthian 
intricacies and are the delight of artists 
and photographers even more than during 
their leafy luxuriance in summer. The 
vines seem to have little choice about the 
trees they clamber over. The sycamores 
and alders, w hite oaks and maples are all 
loaded with wild-grapes that in a few years 
climb to the tops, and trail back in a thou¬ 
sand graceful and flowing curves. In the 
Vaea Yalley some of these laree vines have 
been graited to Muscats and Black Moroc¬ 
cos, with entire success. c. H. s. 
Niles, Cal, 
SOME FINE OLD GRAPES. 
I send by express to the R. N.-Y. a bas¬ 
ket of grapes, of the older varieties, Cataw¬ 
ba, Concord, Diana and Iona, that the 
Editor may judge of their quality as com¬ 
pared with that of some of the newer kinds, 
and of the same as grown at the Rural 
Grounds. They are some that w r ere grown 
by me on the south shore of Lake Erie, not 
a great w r ay from Cleveland, Ohio. The 
weather has been such that they were 
allowed to hang on the vines until October 
24th. Thousands of acres have been planted 
with vines along the shore of the lake, 
generally from one to two miles from the 
water, and vine-growing has become a 
great industry employing a great many 
people. The Concord is taking the lead of 
everything else on account of its produc¬ 
tiveness, hardiness and cheapness, and I 
sometimes think on account of its quality, 
as people want it more and more. 
I wish that I could send to the R. N.-Y. 
some Delawares; but they are gone for the 
season. They were the “fairest of the 
fair;” and w’hen perfect have hardly been 
equaled for fine flavor. Miner’s (the true 
Victoria) made fine bunches this year the 
same as Concord. I have put in a small 
bunch of dried Brighton that the Editor 
may see how much sugar there is in them— 
something like a raisin. H. B. SPENCER. 
Cuyahoga County, Ohio. 
R. N.-Y. The above grapes, though not 
so large as they often are seen in market, 
were of the finest quality. It is certainly 
true that Concord is all the w'hile making 
friends. At this time the price of Concords 
and Cataw 7 bas in the New York market is 
the same. 
THE EFFICIENCY OF SEPARATORS 
An interesting study: results of experi¬ 
ments with various hand and poxver 
cream separators; varying results with 
the Lefeldt and Dc Laval power separa¬ 
tors; conditions that affect the results; 
results from the De Laval hand separa¬ 
tor and the “ Baby Separator power 
needed to operate them. 
There have recently appeared in German 
papers the results of experiments with re¬ 
gard to Lefeldt and De Laval milk sep¬ 
arators to determine under what condition 
the greatest efficiency of creaming can be 
obtained. As these results are of equal 
value in our country, I wish to give a lib-, 
eral translation of the w r ork of Dr. .T. Klein 
and M. Kuhn, O. Nuebert and H. Wil¬ 
helm, as epitomized in “ Biedermanu’s Cen 
tral Blatt fur Agrikulturchemie.” Only 
general results are given. 
Klein and Kuhn have experimented upon 
Lefeldt’s small separator with milk at dif¬ 
ferent temperatures, with greater or less 
influx, and with different sized pistons for 
regulating the flow of the skimmed milk. 
From many results they conclude that the 
efficiency of creaming is, within certain 
limits, greater as the temperature of the 
milk rises. An efficiency of 94 per cent, was 
obtained between 82 and 93 degrees (F.); 
and one of 93.16 per cent, at 70 degrees and 
of 87 per cent, at 55 degrees. The efficiency 
of creaming sank as the quantity of milk 
used in a given time was increased even if 
the relation of cream to skimmed milk re¬ 
mained the same as with the smaller quan¬ 
tity. This same relation was retained by 
enlarging the opening for skimmed milk 
and substituting larger pistons. While an 
efficiency of 94 degrees was obtained by the 
influx of 587 to 627 pounds per hour, it sank 
by the use of 1,100 pounds to 87.52 per cent. 
If the quantity of milk used remained 
the same,the relation of cream to skimmed 
milk exerted less influence. When the 
t elation was one part of cream to four parts 
of skimmed milk a creaming efficiency of 
95.16 per cent, w as obtained. When it was 
one part of cream to 10 of skimmed milk 
the efficiency sank to 94.12 per cent. only. 
Naturally with the higher efficiency 
lower fat contents of the skimmed milk 
were obtained. With the highest ef¬ 
ficiency the skimmed milk contained 
.20 per cent, of fat and with an 
efficiency of about 90 per cent, it contained 
.30—.40 per cent, of fat. From the above 
it appears that the best results were ob¬ 
tained with the relation of one part of 
cream to five parts of skimmed milk. 
Klein and Ktihn conclude that Lefeldt’s 
Separator, running at 6,000 revolutions per 
minute, with milk above 77 degrees, and a 
ratio of cream to skimmed milk as one to 
five and using 620—640 pounds of milk per 
hour, reaches an efficiency of 94 per cent. 
