15)01 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER 
66i 
AN ICE HOUSE WITH CELLAR. 
l have used an ice house with cellar 
such as A. B. W., Newlin, Pa., wants to 
build, and fear he is planning for too 
much expense. Ice is very heavy stuff, 
and his iron beam would not only need 
to he a heavy affair, but his flagging 
stone would need to be at least eight 
inches thick. My cellar (10 feet in¬ 
side) is covered with four heavy sleep¬ 
ers planked over, and I found it neces¬ 
sary to put posts under the two middle 
sleepers. It has been in use 12 or 15 
years, and when it becomes necessary 
to rebuild I shall put in a stone arch. 
The cellar opens into the basement of 
another building with two-foot wall and 
doors at out and inside of wall. The 
outside of doors should be covered with 
sheets of zinc lapped over, so that water 
that condenses will drip off. Inside tne 
air will be as cold as the door, with no 
condensation, but there will always be 
water on the outside in warm weather. 
An ice house 10 feet square, inside, with 
six-inch studs, boarded inside and out, 
and the space filled with sawdust, if 
made so tight at the bottom that there 
will be no circulation of air up through 
the ice, and so open at the top as to give 
good ventilation there, will keep ice all 
Summer if a mass eight feet high is put 
in and kept covered with six inches of 
sawdust. My rafters are two inches 
thick where they lie on the plate, and 
the space between roof board and plate 
is left open, and a triangular space 1% 
foot across tne base, at the gable. The 
posts of my house are but seven feet, so 
I boarded up the under side of the raft¬ 
ers a little way, and fill above the 
posts. We put a layer of straw about 
two inches thick over the plank floor, 
and two or three inches of sawdust on 
that, changing them about once in three 
years. The less Ailing between the ice 
and cellar the cooler the cellar will be, 
but, of course, the ice will waste faster. 
I hardly think A. B. W. would get much 
benefit from his ice through a foot of 
sawdust. Milk and cream will keep 
sweet in such a cellar, but the latter will 
not ripen properly for churning. Ripen¬ 
ed in higher temperature it can be cool¬ 
ed to the proper temperature for churn¬ 
ing very nicely. It will not do to put 
butter in prints in the cellar before mar¬ 
keting, as the customers cannot keep it 
at so low a temperature, and it gets 
softer than if it had never been brought 
so low. My cellar is absolutely dark, 
and we hang fresh meat and throw in 
radishes or other vegetables that we 
want to keep fresh, doing away with a 
refrigei'ator entirely. Perhaps I ought 
not to tell of it, but we roll a barrel of 
new cider in there late in the F^ll and 
have sweet cider in the Spring. We 
sometimes put a few apples in the cellar 
in the Spring to ensure having pie 
apples the year round, although after 
strawberries come we don’t eat many. 
If I were building anew, as A. B. W. 
proposes, I should certainly put another 
building in connection with my ice 
house, with basement connecting with 
the ice house cellar. This basement 
will be plenty cool for the ordinary 
keeping of milk and cream, and being 
light can consequently be made of use 
in many ways. n. s. ii. 
Connecticut. 
A Serviceable Ice Cellar. 
Seeing A. B. W.’s inquiry on page 613 
would say we have had a similar ice 
house in practical use for many years, 
and it keeps ice with a little care from 
ice to ice again. I think it superior to 
his plan, and probably less expensive, 
it is a double thickness of brick, in 
shape of arch, laid in cement, the crown 
being a little over six feet from cellar 
floor. The whole arch and sides are cov¬ 
ered with broken or waste charcoal to 
about three inches above the crown, so 
that it will have the benefit of a non¬ 
conducting bed, and also it is non-de- 
structible, and if not scraped off will 
last a lifetime. The sides should have 
two one-inch pipes inserted at bottom 
to carry off leakage, and these pipes 
should be carried into the ground so 
that they will not create a circulation of 
air and melt the ice. Of course they 
could be turned up at bottom so as to 
hold enough water to keep out air. I 
give a rough outline of our house. Fig. 
297. The house is weather-boarded with 
cedar weather-boarding inside and out. 
The only care is to keep the sides and 
top of ice well incased in sawdust, as 
ice recedes from the sides. The boards 
are put in or taken out as required in 
the window, and the top is never closed. 
There should be a window at each end 
of building to insure free circulation of 
air. The secret of keeping ice is per¬ 
fect drainage at bottom, free circulation 
of air over top, and perfect insulation 
at sides and bottom. This ice house was 
built by my father (Jonathan G. Will¬ 
iams) on his farm near Moorestown. 
Burlington Co., N. .1., and has done and 
is doing good service for many years. 
In the diagram A is the cellar, B the 
brick and C the charcoal, D and B the 
spaces between walls, and F the door. 
Philadelphia. c. w. 
Doubts About the Plan. 
I have had enough experience with ice 
houses to know that such a cellar as A. 
B. W. describes for the purpose wanted 
would be very unsatisfactory, and Is im¬ 
practicable. In the first place, an ice 
house is built to keep ice, A. B. W.’s 
ICE HOUSE WITH CELLAR. FlO. 397. 
plan. If feasible, would waste it. Ice 
cannot cool anything without melting. 
Again, the house with a cellar allows 
no chance for drainage without allow¬ 
ing air to get under ice, just where it 
i.s not wanted. An ice house must have 
good drainage. An ice house built on 
A. B. W.’s plan would be a very unfit 
place for milk; it would be damp, and 
would drop water from sweat forming 
on the stones above. My advice would 
be to build the house at least 15x15 feet; 
leave a good air space in the walls; tar 
paper the inside of outside boarding 
unless matched lumber is used, and 
above all allow good drainage, and 
plenty of ventilation above ice. Such 
an ice house will furnish ice enough to 
cool A. B. W.’s milk and cream in a 
tank in which he can set his cans, or 
any other good way. f. a. t. 
Ridgewood, N. J. 
DRY FODDER IN THE SILO. 
stations showed that the silaged grain 
had more nutritive substance, and gave 
a better feeding result than the same 
grain husked and ground into meal, so 
that^the cost of both husking, grinding, 
and time were all lost, as against silag- 
ing the entire crop. Since then we have 
heard nothing about the practice of 
silaging dried corn fodder. Now and 
then a man places a “grabber” at the 
side of the cutter table, and grabs off 
from the stalks a few bushels of corn 
ears, and cures them out on the grass. 
It is feasible to cut dry fodder into 
the silo, and wet it down so that it wili 
settle, and if weil ti’amped and packed, 
but little of it will mold, but this will 
not restore to the fodder the same feed¬ 
ing quaiities it possessed in the first 
succulent state. A plant once dried can 
never be soaked, steamed, cooked or fer¬ 
mented back into its first feeding value. 
-All that can be done is to make it easier 
masticated by the animal and more pal¬ 
atable, and the animal coaxed into eat¬ 
ing more of it. It is advisable when fill¬ 
ing a silo with dry foddei-, to choose a 
time just after a rain, and then put on 
just as much water as you otherwise 
would. All the benefit of the rain is in 
saving wastage of leaves and fine ma¬ 
terial while drawing. It requires not far 
from 50 to 60 gallons of water to the ton 
of dry fodder, so that the water has to 
be hauled in either case, which means 
that it would best be drawn in the form 
of succulent fodder at the start, and save 
the loss of material in drying, which 
amounts to about 22 to 26 per cent, while 
in a good silo with fodder just beginning 
to glaze its grain, the loss should not 
be over 10 per cent, and in many silos 
last year it did not exceed four to six 
per cent. If fodder is to be wetted 
down, there is no better plan than to 
have a tank with hose and rose sprinkler, 
so fixed that the water is thrown upon 
the fine fodder as it comes from the 
knives into the carrier, and made ap¬ 
parently very wet, and in going up the 
spout and the “throw,” together with 
the forking and tramping, the water 
gets very evenly distributed through the 
mass. To get on 50 gallons or so of 
water to the ton makes it look very 
much wetter thau it should be, but when 
one considers that in drying corn fod¬ 
der it loses about 700 pounds of mois¬ 
ture to the ton, the necessity of making 
it very wet, so to get the heating and 
ferment, is very apparent. If one will 
read Henry’s Feeds and Feeding he will 
readily see that cutting, or any method 
of treating foods once dried, is simply 
to increase the animal’s liking for it, 
and clean up the manger, the economy 
being in getting the animai to eat up the 
coarser parts, but the digestibility of 
the food has not been increased. In 
other words, where an animal will eat 
up a certain dry, coarse food iike corn 
fodder, within 10 per cent, it wiil not 
pay to assist in any mechanical way in 
the feeding, like cutting, steaming, si¬ 
laging or “fussing.” One Winter before 
our silo was built, we fed the cows whole 
fodder, ran the rejections through the 
fodder cutter, piled it in heaps, wet 
down, anu mixed in fine bran and Cov¬ 
ered with an old canvas, and when the 
mass became hot, fed it out to tue cows 
for a change ration, and saved cutting 
about 85 per cent of the fodder, and the 
remainder was so small in amount, that 
it mixed in with the other food without 
perceptible change in the milk product. 
Ohio. JOHN GOULD. 
A Southern sportsman gives the follow¬ 
ing directions for cooking brook trout in 
camp: “As soon as the fish is landed, dress 
and put in a little butter, salt and pepper, 
and a small piece of bacon. Then lay the 
trout in a corn shuck out of which a roast¬ 
ing ear has been taken, smooth the leaves 
down and tie at the silk end; bury in the 
timbers, and cover with live coals. The 
ear of corn is to be roasted and eaten with 
the fish.” . 
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FOR FALL 
PLANTING 
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The New Horticulture 
Several years ago the plan of allowing 
corn to be shocked in the field and well 
dried out, then drawing and cutting in¬ 
to the silo, was advocated by the late 
Hon. Henry Tallcot, of Ohio, and Edgar 
Huidekoper, of Meadville, Pa., and 
warmly commended, the chief point of 
commendation being the saving of field 
freightage. So far as I know, the prac¬ 
tice is not followed now, for the reason 
that it was found in practice that the 
great loss in drying the fodder (some¬ 
thing over 20 per cent of the entire dry 
matter being rendered indigestible) over¬ 
balanced the saving in freight. Then it 
was found that there was no loss in food 
material by the ears being cut into the 
silage, rather a gain, as the experiment 
BY H. M. STRINCrELLOW, 
We do not hesitate to say that this is one of the most 
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THE RURAL NEW-YORKER, New York. 
