1898 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER. 
821 
AMONG THE MARKETMEN. 
WHAT I SEE AND HEAR. 
Abbreviated Kadishes.—A couple of boxes of 
radishes from southern New Jersey were a motley 
lot. They were of several different colors, kinds 
and sizes, some of them big enough for turnips. 
They didn’t fit the boxes very well, so they had been 
chopped off at the lower ends to make them fit. 
Not even the wagon boys wanted such a lot, and there 
they stood, day after day, awaiting a buyer. I noticed 
them every time I passed for about a week, and I pre¬ 
sume they are still waiting. Probably the shipper 
will condemn the commission man, when his own 
ignorance alone was at fault. There is no demand 
for such large radishes, and the manner of packing 
would have spoiled their sale if there had been. 
t X X 
Why Grape Prices Are Low. —I have seen a 
number of people who say that they do not eat grapes 
because they are afraid of appendicitis. They say 
that they cannot bear to go to all the trouble of spit¬ 
ting out the seeds, and as they do not dare to swallow 
them, they go without the luxury of the grapes. As 
I presume hundreds more entertain the same ideas, it 
is easy to see that, in the aggregate, a large quantity 
of grapes will go uneaten, that otherwise might find 
a market. I asked Dr. Geo. F. Shrady, of this city, 
who is editor of the Medical Record, and one of the 
most advanced physicians of the time, his opinion of 
this matter. His answer was very brief, and very 
much to the point. Here it is : “ There is nothing in 
the grape-seed scare. The lodgment of seeds in the 
appendix is an accidental rather than a causative con¬ 
dition.” There you have it. We need to educate peo¬ 
ple up to the fact that grapes are not only healthful 
but harmless, and thus increase their sale and in¬ 
directly make better prices. Many other physicians 
and surgeons have borne testimony to the fact that 
there is no earthly reason for fearing appendicitis 
from eating grapes. 
t t X 
Poultry Pickings from the Thanksgiving 
Market. —The weather the preceding week, while 
the poultry was on the way, was very unfavorable, 
warm and muggy ; but it changed to cooler and clear 
Monday and Tuesday, becoming bad again on Wed¬ 
nesday. The larger part of the shipments arrived in 
fair condition. Turkeys were in greatest demand; 
all except the poorest were about all cleaned up early 
on Monday. The stores of the receivers were busy 
places on Monday. As the different lots come in, a 
record must be made of each, that no mistake in re¬ 
turns be made. When a buyer is found, the packages 
are emptied, the contents weighed, and the poultry 
again packed. I counted more than 20 men in one 
commission house who were taking in the packages, 
unpacking, selling, weighing, repacking, marking 
and billing. All were hustling, and this had been 
going on without cessation since long before daylight. 
One lot of turkeys had the legs unjointed at the first 
joint to make them pack in the barrels better. Very 
little straw was used in packing. The larger part 
came in barrels. Ducks and geese were a glut on the 
market. Extremely large turkeys did not sell as well 
as the medium sizes. Very few turkeys had the flight 
feathers left on in dressing. Live poultry wasn’t 
wanted. Choice fowls and chicks sold fairly well. 
Some of the poultry was nearly skinned in dressing ; 
this is avoided in dry picking. 
X X X 
Skipping - Honey. —One of the worst farm products 
to get to market in good condition, is comb honey. A 
large per cent of it is broken down and ruined by 
careless handling, and many commission merchants 
dislike to handle it on that account. At Fig. 373 is 
CRATE FOR SHIPPING COMB HONEY. Fig. 373. 
shown a crate illustrated by R. C. Aikin, in Gleanings 
in Bee Culture. It is light and cheaply constructed, 
of a size easily handled by one man when filled, and 
so made as always to be carried and set down with 
the sections on edge, a very important consideration. 
Four of the faces are smooth, the boards nailed on the 
outside, while the boards of the other two sides are 
nailed on the inside of the frame, forming two panels 
which make a convenient hand-hold by which to pick 
it up. It is impossible to pick the case up by any of 
the other sides, and this keeps the crate in such posi¬ 
tion that the sections always stand on edge. This 
crate is designed to hold two cases of sections, about 
50 or 60 pounds of honey, but may be made of any de¬ 
sired size. It is a little larger inside than the outside 
of the cases, and the space between may be packed 
with excelsior or other suitable material to help re¬ 
lieve the jar. When loaded in a car, the crates should 
be set down so that the sections are parallel with the 
sides of the car, as they are less liable to damage in 
transit. After all, the best market for honey is the 
home market. f. h. v. 
A YANKEE IN OHIO. 
HOW THE STATE BOOKS TO EASTERN EYES. 
Its Advantages and Disadvantages. 
Part VII. 
| EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE. I 
Two Great Advantages. —I have said that there 
seem to be few weeds in this country. When I spoke 
of this, farmers smiled and said that they had weeds 
enough. I wonder what they would say if they had 
to tackle the crop that is seeded from some of our 
idle eastern farms. One seldom sees an idle or useless 
field in this western country. With us many farms 
and fields stand idle, and produce enormous weed crops 
which seed the whole neighborhood. The sheep and 
the Blue grass cleaned out the weeds. The grass 
crowds in everywhere if given any chance. I saw 
fields of raspberries where the Blue grass had come 
crowding in as thick as a mat almost as soon as the 
cultivator stopped. 
Farmers in this region have cheap and excellent 
fuel in the coal that is dug from under their farms. 
They can buy first-class coal at $1 a ton at the mine. 
Grate fires abound in the farmhouses, and they are 
far more cheerful and comfortable than the iron boxes 
or hole in the floor, which most of us must use. 
Serious Lil’e Problems. —It must not be thought 
that the people in this quiet, peaceful country have 
solved all the serious problems of farm living. What 
to do with the land is still an unsolved question. 
Happily, the sheep left the soil in such excellent con¬ 
dition that it is strong enough to support almost any 
branch of agriculture. The country is now in the 
midst of a change, and many farmers will, possibly, 
end by going back to sheep again. These changes 
come hard on the older men. I met one elderly man 
who was face to face with a hard question. In the 
old days of sheep farming, he was prosperous. Like 
most Of these farmers, his chief capital lay in the 
land itself—not in the accumulated earnings from it. 
The boys were sent away to be educated, and found 
good openings in business. In order to educate the 
girls, the farmer moved to the college town—leaving 
the farm to be run by others. Now he comes back to 
find the country in the midst of a change. The sheep 
have gone—with them his boys and girls. How can the 
farm, under these conditions, support the tenant and 
the old farmer ? The average New England man still 
fancies that the western people have some sort of 
reverence for the East. A few days even as far west 
as Ohio, would change his mind. These western 
people are independent, and firmly believe that they 
have the finest country, the best brains, and the 
shrewdest faculties on earth. 
The Ohio Hen seemed to be taking a vacation at 
the time of my visit. I ate fried, chicken that was far 
too good for most of the kings on earth, but not an 
egg was to be found. “ Our hens are laying seven or 
eight a day ! ” They say that in Ohio just as they do 
in New Jersey, but the hens somehow seem to take a 
distant day for their laying. It is wonderful how 
many Plymouth Rock fowls one finds on these west¬ 
ern farms. I noticed scarcely a score of Leghorns 
during the trip. One man said that the Plymouth 
Rock was good enough for him, because it is an 
American breed. Near Aurora, I visited a duck and 
chicken farm where the wastes from a restaurant in 
Cleveland are utilized as food. Stranahan Bros. Co. 
own both the restaurant and the farm. The refuse 
or swill comes three times a week. The bread and 
cake come mixed together, and this makes good hen 
food when ground up dry or soaked. The meat comes 
by itself. This does well for ducks, but is not so 
good for hens, especially in hot weather. A cooker is 
used on the farm for cooking part of this food. I 
should think this refuse would be much better for 
hogs or ducks than for hens. Hogs were fed last year, 
but many of them died. This was, probably, because 
the swill was fed in troughs so that the hogs swal¬ 
lowed the liquids. These liquids contain dissolved 
soap and soap powders used in washing dishes, and 
where this is too strong, it means death to the hog. 
Where the whole thing is thrown on sod ground, the 
liquids soak into the ground, and the solid part is 
harmless. A duck will usually handle such food to 
even better advantage than a hog. At this place, 
though, I understand they made the mistake last year 
of keeping too many ducks in one flock. The hens on 
the farm were mostly from eggs bought from neigh¬ 
boring farms. They were a mixed lot with Plymouth 
Rock blood predominating. The fixtures on the farm 
were all first-class, but I question the wisdom of try¬ 
ing to keep hens on such refuse. I think ducks or 
hogs will give better returns for it. 
A Different Country. —As we went west from 
Jefferson County, the country changed. The valleys 
grew wider, and the hills lower, and at last we came 
to long, level stretches. There seemed to be less of 
the Blue grass and more gullied fields. Now and then 
we saw a corn field not cut up at all, but “ hogged 
down ”—that is, the hogs were turned in to smash 
down the stalks and eat what they would of it with 
the ears. The hogs do a remarkably clean job at such 
work. But few [stalks were left standing, and most 
of them seemed to be eaten down past the ear. This 
seems like a wasteful practice to a Jersey farmer, yet 
these men are able to give sound arguments in its 
favor. 
As we went west—away from the hills along the 
river—we heard less about Blue grass and far more 
about clover. Yet, strange to say, there was a different 
rotation of crops. On the Western Reserve, the wheat 
followed the clover, and the corn fields were bare and 
brown. Here, the corn fields were as green as a sod, 
for, in this country, corn follows clover, and wheat 
follows corn. After the corn is cut and shocked in 
rows wide apart, the fields are disked or cultivated, 
and wheat is drilled around and between the shocks 
of corn. The wheat was up high enough to show how 
closely around the shocks the driver had been able to 
go. Some had left great bare spaces, and others had 
not gone between the shocks at all, while other care¬ 
ful drivers had covered everything but the place 
where the shock stood. 
Near Newark, I saw the first work of a narrow 
drill which seeds the wheat in the standing corn. 
This wheat looked well, and gave about the most 
even stand of any I saw. The farther we went into 
this great clover country, the more general seemed 
this idea of seeding wheat in the corn. When you 
consider it, that is a rational way of treating land. 
The clover sod is decomposed during the latter part of 
Summer, and when the corn is cut, large quantities 
of nitrates are left in the soil. There are few plants 
that could make better use of this nitrogen than 
young wheat or rye. In New Jersey, we usually fol¬ 
low corn with potatoes on which fertilizers are used 
heavily, with wheat to follow the potatoes. The weak 
point in this rotation is that the ground lies bare 
after the corn—just the time when the ground is 
likely to be full of soluble nitrates. That is one rea¬ 
son why Crimson clover in the corn, to occupy the 
field during the Winter, is such a helpful crop. h. w. c. 
BUSINESS BITS. 
There probably never was a time when a man without capital 
of his own could go into the farming business on so large a 
scale and under so favorable circumstances as just now. An 
advertiser in The R. N.-Y. last week is willing to put $10,000 or 
$12,000 worth of property into the hands of a man and his wife 
who prove themselves capable of managing it. 
A cow ought to be tied so as to give her the greatest freedom 
consistent with cleanliness and comfort of the animal next to 
her. The Newton cow tie covers these conditions pretty well. It 
Is so constructed that it must move forward when the cow iB 
lying down, and stand back when standing. E. C. Newton Com¬ 
pany, Batavia, Ill., make these ties. You may have their cata¬ 
logue free if you want it. 
When a horse skates around on the frozen ground he some¬ 
times keeps his feet all right, and suffers no bad results. More 
often, however, he goes down and breaks a shaft, or goes lame 
from straining a muscle. The Blizzard horse shoe is intended to 
avoid all these by enabling you to “ sharpen ” your own horse 
before he leaves the stable an icy morning. S. W. Kent, Cazen- 
ovia, N. Y., will tell you all about it. 
From the nature of the complaints we get about Lovett Co., 
of Little Silver, N. J., we should say that it would be a good idea 
to look up references before shipping goods there, or sending re¬ 
mittances there for goods. We have every sympathy for a busi¬ 
ness man who has met with misfortune where he expected 
success. But we find no excuse for a man or a firm who contracts 
obligations knowing that he will not be able to meet them when 
due. 
One often spends more money in repairing an old article than 
a new one would cost. We do a little fixing now, and a little 
again, never having it in first-class shape, and always fearfui 
that the rickety old thing will give out just when the breaking 
will cause most annoyance. This applies, perhaps, more par¬ 
ticularly to wagon wheels than to most other things, but to all 
in a degree. The Wilmington Wheel Co., Wilmington, Del., fur¬ 
nish new strong wheels any size for any style of wagon, and send 
you free directions for measuring, and price list. Before having 
old wheels repaired, we think it will pay to get their prices for 
the new wheels. They make them cheap. 
It does not make any difference whether you have any meat 
that goes to waste about your home or not. Neither does it mat¬ 
ter that you get along nicely chopping meat with a knife in the 
bottom of a well-hacked wooden tray—the discarded butter tray, 
perhaps. You may be economical and saving, and a good, mod¬ 
ern cook; but, admitting all that, we want you to address a postal 
card to The Enterprise Mfg. Co., Philadelphia, Pa., then turn the 
card over and write: “ Please send me ‘ The Enterprise House¬ 
keeper.’ ” Sign your name, and drop the card into the post- 
ofiice box. If you are not glad you took our advice, let us know. 
