834 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER. 
December 14 
EVERf HER HER OWN STOVE. 
Hew Plan for Housewa'-ming. 
I think it is probable that O. W. Mapes, of Middle- 
town, has owned over 50,000 different hens during 
the last 15 years. That ought to give him a pretty 
fair insight into a hen’s charaoter and wants, par¬ 
ticularly as he has studied Mrs. Biddy as few other 
men have. We have told the story of Mr. Mapes’s 
poultry business so many times that older readers 
know that he keeps from 1,500 to 2,000 layers. They 
are kept in small houses scattered about a rocky farm 
on whait is known as the “colony plan’’—that is, there 
are no fences or runs and no large houses. Each lit¬ 
tle house shelters 50 to 60 hens. In Summer the hens 
all run together—each returning to its own little 
house at night. In Winter they are closely housed. 
Mr. Mapes spent many years in trying ito learn how 
to feed a hen properly. He thinks he knows, but he 
found, as most poultrymen do, that no matter how 
well you feed a hen she cannot do her best so long 
as she is chilled by the cold. You may set a green¬ 
house plant in the richest soil and feed it all ii needs, 
yet it the temperature go too low the plant will not 
thrive. This same thing is true of a hen. You may 
feed her all the elements necessary to produce an 
egg, but if her feci are cold and her comb is nipped 
by the frost the egg will not he forthcoming. The 
little houses scattered over the farm are warmly 
built, of good material. They are comfortable in or¬ 
dinary weather, but there are many weeks during the 
Winter when, if fair venitilation be given in the ordi¬ 
nary way, water will freeze in them, and that means 
frozen combs. Aside from the fact that no cold hen 
can be expected to lay well, Mr. Mapes believed that 
too large a share of the food went to supply animal 
heat. When you are feeding 2,000 cold hens this 
means sometthing, and Mr. Mapes began to study the 
heat question as he had the food problem. Reports 
come now and then of houses in which stoves or steam 
have been used for heating, but even if they were sat¬ 
isfactory they could not be used in Mr. Mapes’s sys¬ 
tem, for that would mean heating 40 separate houses. 
“I have it at last—every hen her own stove.’’ 
That is what Mr. Mapes wrote after a long study of 
the problem and so, one cold night in November, I 
went up to see a hen act as a stove. It was quite cold 
enough to nip a nose or freeze the water in the aver¬ 
age henhouse. After supper we stanted out to see the 
hens. As we opened the door of the first house not 
a hen could be seen. The room seemed to be cut in 
two. Investigation showed that a large hinged door 
or shutter just wide enough to play up and down in¬ 
side of the house had been let down in front of the 
hens. There was just space enough at the bottom for 
a medium-sized man to crawl under. It was quite 
cold enough to freeze water in front of this shutter, 
but as we straightened up inside of it we found the 
air evidently warmer. The thermometer registered 
52 degrees a little above the perches where the hens 
were roosting. Strange to say this warm air seemed 
as fresh and pure as the air outside—and the nose is 
a pretty good test in such matters! The hens were 
certainly keeping the air warm with the animal heat 
from their own bodies, but how was it possible to 
keep this air pure, without letting this heat escape? 
In order to understand what w'as going on, turn to 
the little picture at Fig. 376. We are supposed to be 
looking into the house. The arrangements are not 
exactly as here pictured, but the principle may be 
made clear, F is a platform under the perches, R. 
D D is the hinged door or shutter. When we entered 
the house this was down, covering the dotted lines 
so as to shut the hens into a little room by them¬ 
selves. The space above the hens was boarded over 
and packed with straw to make all airtight and the 
sides were also perfectly closed. 
As all know, 50 hens crowded into this small space 
would quickly warm it, yet if left there for any length 
of time many of them would die, and all would suffer 
because, without ventilation the oxygen of the air 
would be consumed. To overcome this Mr. Mapes 
had arranged the devices shown at A, B and C. B is 
a box of wood about five inches square. It starts 
about a foot from the floor of the house and runs into 
A, which is a larger box with sides of thin copper. 
Another section of B continues on from A—out 
through the roof. Now see what happens when D is 
shut down and the hens are on their roosts. As the 
air becomes warm the copper sides of A become slow¬ 
ly heated, while of course the wood of B is not af¬ 
fected. As a result the air inside A becomes warm, 
rises, and passes out through the opening to the roof. 
This creates a draft, so that air is sucked up through 
B from near the floor. This action keeps up as long 
as the heat around the copper at A is greater than 
that near the floor. At C is an opening from the out¬ 
side with another wooden box running up to near the 
top of the house, or about a level with the hens. This 
intake is regulated by a slide so that the pure air is 
gently let in, supplying the place of the foul air 
sucked up through A and B. Thus the hens are shut 
in, away from severe drafts, and still supplied with 
pure air. As is well known, expired air is heavier 
than that taken into the lungs. In hadly ventilated 
places the greatest danger is near the floor. You will 
observe that in this system of Mr. Mapes the air is 
sucked from the bottom so that little if any pure air 
is removed. To show the force of the air current at 
B. Mr. Mapes put a feather near it and this was 
sucked instantly up the box. The current of pure 
air at C was very gentle—creating no dangerous draft. 
It would be hard to pick serious flaws in this sys¬ 
tem as it operated that cold night. Most henhouses 
are, I regret to say, so full of cracks and holes that 
the hen cannot possibly warm them, but for a tight 
house, where the hens can be tucked into bed behind 
a wooden shutter, they really seem to be able to carry 
tbeir own stove around with them. Mr. Mapes says 
that he obtained the germ of his plan from a lecture 
on stable ventilation by H. B. Cook. With small ani¬ 
mals like hens the barn system will not work—so he 
devised the scheme of crowding the hens together at 
night in the warmest possible place, and using the 
copper to pump out the foul air without creating a 
draft. I will try to tell about Mr. Mapes’s new plan 
of feeding next week. h. w. c. 
FUTURE OF CULTIVATED CHESTNUTS. 
Several years ago quite an interest was developed in 
growing Japan chestnuts for market. We should judge 
that many trees were planted, and it was thought that 
in a few years the markets would be well filled with 
these nuts. We do not find many of them on sale. What, 
in your opinion, is the cau.se of this apparent failure? 
Do you think chestnut culture will ever be a profitable 
enterprise in this country, and if not, why? 
The Japan chestnuts have failed in Maine because 
of the rigorous climate. Several varieties were plant- 
“UNCLE DICK” HALEY. Fio. 377. 
ed upon the station grounds in 1892, but none of them 
survived more than three years. The American spe¬ 
cies is grown in some parts of the Staie, and I be¬ 
lieve that improved varieties of this class may be 
grown with profit, as there is a large demand for the 
nuts in the Fall and early Winter, and large quanti¬ 
ties are shipped in from Massachusetts and New York. 
Maine. w. m. munson. 
Considerable grafting of the large varieties of 
chestnuts has been done here for several years past, 
and these gratted trees are now bearing. Some of 
them bear in two years from grafting. This present 
season the chestnut crop was exceedingly light all 
over the peninsula, as far as my observation extends. 
The local markets consume large quantities of these 
nuts at remunerative prices. I think ii would take 
a very large crop of these nuts to make much differ¬ 
ence in city supply, because so many are consumed 
at home. There has been no failure in this line, and 
it pays those who have the bearing trees. 
Delaware. e. g. Packard. 
While there are thousands of people interested in 
every section of the United States where the chestnut 
can be grown, the comparatively high price of the 
trees has deterred people from buying any number. 
Most of my customers I know have bought in lots 
from three to 10 trees; have cultivated liberally, but 
have cut away all the wood each year for grafting 
native chestnut sprouts, and so are obtaining little 
fruit as yet. The Japanese chestnuts unite more 
freely with our native stocks than do those having 
European blood like Paragon, Ridgely, etc., but even 
the Japans do not grow as readily as apples and other 
stocks easily grafted, and so it has been rather a slow 
process building up commercial orchards, and I think 
it will be some years yet before any considerable 
amount of the nuts are on the market. I had about 
100 bushels of nuts in a five-year-old orchard in 
Georgia this year, but the warm weather when they 
matured in September down there, caused a large ma¬ 
jority to turn rancid almost before we could get them 
into market. Those that did get to market in good 
order sold for $10 or $12 a bushel, which, of course, 
is an extreme price, but I believe the large size and 
great beauty and good quality of these nuts would 
have caused them all to sell at least $8 per bushel, 
had it not been for turning rancid as they did. I have 
had no trouble with these same varieties here in 
Connecticut. J- e. hale. 
Connecticut. 
The fact that the large chestnuts like the Japan, 
Paragon and others are not more plentiful in the city 
markets may be due to several causes. The grafted 
trees have been and are still comparatively high 
priced, and somewhat uncertain to grow when trans¬ 
planted. They seem to be more particular as to soil 
than most trees. Growers hesitate to plant largely 
for these reasons. Another reason why the nuts are 
not more plentiful is that the trees grow slowly, and 
the grower must wait quite a while before paying 
crops can be gathered. It requires quite a good-sized 
tree to produce a bushel or even half a bushel of nuts. 
The best method of getting a paying orchard seems 
to be to graft chestnut sprouts, as the trees grow 
much more rapidly and produce paying crops sooner. 
Ihe method has its drawbacks, too, as considerable 
cash must be paid out for keeping underbrush down. 
We know of several large tracts on this plan, but 
they have all been started within the last six or seven 
years, and only the oldest of them are bearing any¬ 
thing like a crop. In our opinion it will be several 
years before the market is well supplied. If they 
could be grown as easily as Kieffer pears the market 
would soon be overstocked. Another drawback to 
chestnut growing is the weevil, and it will be a draw¬ 
back until some effective method of destroying the 
insect is found. The grubs in the nuts can be de¬ 
stroyed by fumigating with carbon bisulphide, but as 
some escape from the nut before it drops there are 
always enough left for seed. The orchards started 
on sprout land are generally contiguous to chestnut 
timber, where the beetles multiply and easily find 
their way to the grafted trees. We are not prepared 
to say whether chestnut growing will be a profitable 
industry for this country or not. It will require some 
time, we think, to solve that problem. 
Pennsylvania. n. m. engle & son. 
THE WOODCHUCK—I wish to enter a protest against 
the woodchuck; It is a very destructive pest in this sec¬ 
tion. There should be a bounty paid or some other 
means taken to exterminate these animals, as they are 
of no benefit to the world either dead or alive, and do 
u great deal of damage to growing crops every year. I 
would have the much-despised skunk protected by law, 
as it does a great deal towards keeping in check the 
white grub (larvse of the May beetle): also destroys a 
great number of mice, grasshoppers and other destruc¬ 
tive pests. The damage done by his occasional visits to 
the hencoop is nothing compared with the good work 
he carries on in the field. george g. walker. 
Massachusetts. 
FAVORS KIEFFER PEAR.—The Kieffer pear is be¬ 
yond doubt a poor pear to eat from the hand, and es¬ 
pecially so unless great care is given to its handling, 
but nevertheless it is used largely on our market, we 
believe, with an increasing demand year by year. This 
year the crop is of better quality than usual, and we 
think they are at this time drawing better prices than 
any previous year since there has been any considerable 
quantity on the market. We recognize it as a coarse, 
common pear, but commercial orchards are very pio- 
ductive. The fruit being hardy will transport to any 
part of the country, or can be kept well into the Winter, 
and for those reasons it has been and, we believe, will 
continue to be a good money maker, even when sold at 
very moderate prices. I have great faith in it for the 
above reasons, and so have an orchard of l,i00 trees. 
Philadelphia, J- Hendrickson. 
