1901 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER 
855 
HOPE FARM NOTES 
Rye Straw Manure. —I have the fol¬ 
lowing letter from Yates Co., N. Y.: 
In Hope Farm Notes, page 807, you speak 
of selling rye straw. We sold ours, and 
many of our neighbors also, not for $15 
per ton, but for $7 baled. We pnid $1 per 
ton for baling and boarded mer and 
teams. Did this pay at this price after 
hauling to market? Would our land be 
better off with this straw worked into 
manure; or this straw money spent for 
(■hemicals? If rye straw will stand IBO 
years in mortar, how long will It take to 
lot into manure? Our rotation is rye, 
clover and beans, the clover being plowed 
under for beans, and rye sown after beans 
without plowing. After getting two crops 
of beans we put in a hay, corn and wheat 
rotation, seeding to clover again after the 
wheat. From your figures that rye straw 
Is worth $2.40 per ton as fertilizer, at the 
price of chemicals here. Is there $2.50 or 
$3 worth of humus in it that will pay 
quick returns for the trouble of liandling 
long rye straw in manure? We use our 
manure on the corn, but have to help ii 
out with a potash and phosphoric acid 
mixture. The serious question with us is 
humus. Our soil gets lumpy and hard 
after rains, and when in this condition the 
chemicals do not sliow results. H. e. m. 
I have always regarded rye straw as 
the poorest of all humus crops except 
in some cases on heavy clays. It is so 
tough and hard that it does not rot 
readily. 1 have told how my neighbor, 
in tearing down his old stone house, 
found in the clay which was used for 
mortar, pieces of rye straw which were 
still quite tough. They were put in that 
clay nearly if not quite 150 years ago, 
and had never rotted. Of course that 
is not a fair test for the straw as hu¬ 
mus, for^ in any cultivated soil the air 
and wawr would be admitted so as to 
rot the straw. It would be slow work, 
however—in fact, I think rye straw will 
stay in the soil without yielding up its 
plant food longer than any other ordi¬ 
nary humus crop. 
USE.S OF Humus. —On some stiff, heavy 
clays this might be desirable, for these 
soils are naturally rich and do not need 
plant food as much as they need shak¬ 
ing up. The stiff, hard rye straw holds 
them open—makes them porous and ad¬ 
mits air and water. There may be one 
case in 50 where such a thing as delaying 
the decay of humus would be desirable. 
In the other 49 the best plan would 
probably be to make it available as 
quickly as possible. Humus is not un¬ 
like money. There may be some cases 
where it is desirable to lock it up so 
that we cannot obtain the principal for 
years, and where the interest will be al¬ 
most too small to count, but in the great 
majority of cases, we like to have our 
property available, so that we may turn 
it easily and obtain a quick income from 
it. I would certainly sell the rye straw 
at $7 and buy potash and dissolved rock 
with the money. It is true that analy¬ 
sis shows that the rye straw contains 
some fertility, but that fertility is lock¬ 
ed up so tight that it is not worth $2.40 
as compared with the same value in 
rock and potash or in clover, because 
it is not so available. At the same time 
I believe in green rye as a humus crop 
under some conditions. We often use 
it, but we would plow it under while 
it is soft enough to cut for hay. You 
can adopt a child while its habits are 
soft and pliable, and it may help nour¬ 
ish your family tree. If you wait until 
ehese habits have hardened and stiffened 
your tree will need something stronger 
than Bordeaux Mixture. I prefer to use 
humus that decays quickly. 
Buckwheat or Cow Peas. —This leads 
up to the following question: 
I would like to a.sk some of your people 
who are growing cow peas in the North, 
whether they think it would pay me in 
southern Cayuga County to sow peas on 
a meadow that is cut early, say June 15, 
and plow in the next Spring for potatoes, 
or as 1 am doing now, sow to buckwheat 
.Tuly 1, and after this sow rye about Octo¬ 
ber 1 and seed with clover, which is cut 
f)nce and then plowed again. 1 can gener¬ 
ally grow about 25 bushels of buckwheat 
at 50 cents a bushel. Do you not think 
this money invested in chemicals woidd 
do more for the land than eow peas? 
If I lived in Cayuga Co., N. Y., I 
should go to Cornell University and get 
Dr. 1. P. Roberts to look at the tongue 
of that farm. I don’t feel like giving 
direct advice about cow peas for any 
farm north of my own. I know that 
with us cow-pea vines make the most 
quickly available humus of anything 
we can put into the ground. Get a good 
mat of them, let them lie on the ground 
over Winter and plow under in the 
Spring. They equal well rotted manure 
in their effect on the next crop. I am 
on record as saying that 1 would not 
sow cow peas on land that is already 
good enough to grow a fair corn crop. 
1 will stick to that, although men who 
should know more than I do about it 
say it is not good advice. With my 
present experience, if I had that mea¬ 
dow at Hope Farm, I would cut it early 
anyway. If my other crops were such 
that I expected to be short on grain I 
should sow buckwheat, but add to it a 
peck of Crimson clover seed per acre. 
If, after the buckwheat were cut, the 
clover looked well, I would let it alone 
—plowing it unuer in the Spring for po¬ 
tatoes. I would double the $12.50 ob¬ 
tained for the buckwheat (it would 
bring more with us), and buy high- 
grade fertilizer to go on each acre of 
potatoes. The clover would, I think, be 
far ahead of the green rye for fertility. 
Would it equal a crop of cow peas? 1 
do not think so, still we use fertilizer 
for potatoes anyway, and the old mea¬ 
dow and the clover supply plenty of hu¬ 
mus. The 25 bushels of buckwheat will 
remove 22 pounds of nitrogen, four of 
potash and nine of phosphoric acid. 
With the $12.50 I can buy 225 pounds ni¬ 
trate of soda, 125 muriate of potash and 
400 pounds of dissolved rock, or 35 
pounds of nitrogen, 60 of potash and 50 
of phosphoric acid. If this were not a 
piece of meadow land, or if Crimson 
clover did not do well here I should cer¬ 
tainly omit the buckwheat and sow cow 
peas—spending most of the money that 
the buckwheat would have bought for 
potash and rock to use with the cow 
peas. I would not think of planting po¬ 
tatoes in soil that was lacking in avail¬ 
able humus. I don’t believe there is 
anything equal to cow-pea vines for this 
purpose. What comes next? In our ex¬ 
perience Crimson clover and coarse ma¬ 
nure are about equal! Of course all your 
fields are well covered at present with 
a humus crop? I regret that truth com¬ 
pels me to say that there are several 
bare fields which ought to be covered. 
Why do you not practice your own 
preaching? I fear I am like the minis¬ 
ter who said he preached so much that 
he didn’t have time to practice. Most 
of Hope Farm is well covered this Win¬ 
ter, but the wet season crowded work 
so that part of the land could not be 
seeded. 
Woman’s Ways. —Winter is usually a 
hard time for the women on the farms. 
’I’hey are often shut in for days or even 
weeks at a time. We have no telephone 
yet at Hope Farm, though we ought to 
have. The Madame doesn’t like the 
cold, and the wind over the hills is so 
fierce that she doesn’t go out unless 
there is some urgent need for it. A lady 
in New York State sends me this bit of 
opinion: 
If farmers’ wives would help with the 
chores, be on familiar terms with cows and 
horses, also the poultry, go out to the 
barn every day, no matter what the 
weather, happier women would be the re¬ 
sult, for with heaith comes happiness. 
A. E. V. 
I’ll leave that for some one else to 
discuss. No thank you—I know better 
■than to attempt to tell the women folks 
what they ought to do. As I get older 
and better able to fill the largest chair 
in the house it becomes a source of re¬ 
gret to me that I wasted so much time 
in attempting to give advice. Do they 
prefer to have those of their own sex 
advise them? Now yon won’t get a 
word of opinion out of me except the 
fact that I would like to ask if women 
doctors usually have a very large prac¬ 
tice. I suppose most men conclude at 
one time or another that their wives 
have no such thing as judgment. If it 
is possible to make them comprehend 
the truth they will wake up some day 
to learn that their much prized “judg¬ 
ment” is like brass beside the golden 
instinct which prompts a woman to 
know what is best. 
A lady in Michigan writes that she is 
much interested in Billy Berk and the 
other black boarders because they have 
Berkshires on their farm. But she says: 
Those same little pigs that I think so 
much of rooted out my Ruby Queen rose 
so that it died. I felt so bad about that, 
but those pigs got shut up, so they dii 
not root out any more roses for me. 
I’ll warrant they were kept shut up 
after that. When a rose is so fine that 
Berkshires want to use it for a nose¬ 
gay we may conclude that it is worth 
rooting for. If I may be permitted to 
make an observation right here, I will 
say that it is too bad that more of our 
farm women do not make a firm stand 
against things they are justified in op¬ 
posing —before the gign root up the rose-'<. 
Farm Notes. —The weather continued 
cold through the first week in Decem¬ 
ber, giving our part of the country the 
coldest Thanksgiving season for 30 
years. The frost crawled deep into the 
ground and drove all hands out of the 
cellar for the new house. A warm wave 
followed, but that cold snap will crackle 
all through history as a time for frosted 
window panes, red noses and chilled 
fingers out of season. Charlie’s speed 
as he brings in the morning’s milk is a 
good index to the rise or fall in the 
mercury. . . When the cellar froze 
up the boys began to haul wood. We 
expected the steam engine in a few days 
to run the shredder and circular saw 
and so it was necessary to haul a big 
pile of logs from the woods. Coming 
down our steep hill with a heavy load 
was dangerous business, for the face of 
the hill was coated with ice. We use a 
low-down, wide-tired wagon. It is ex¬ 
cellent for most purposes, but out of 
place on our hill in an icy season. It 
IS difficult to lock these low, broad 
wheels so as to hold back. They slide 
like a wide-runnered sled. In very deep 
sticky mud these broad wheels pull 
hard, for the mud piles up over them. 
For all other kinds of work we prefer 
the low-down wheels. . . We find 
December, January and February the 
best months for feeding shredded fod¬ 
der. I am speaking of the fodder that 
is usually brought to barn or stack. As 
a rule, it is not well cared for, being 
put in large shocks and not well cured. 
By March such fodder is usually moldy. 
It sui-ely pays us to take pains with our 
fodder. It is, of course, all under cover 
and is green—not brown or dull yellow. 
It was cut into small shocks and left 
open to the air and sun. Of course our 
Fall has been very favorable to the 
proper curing of this fodder. Still, there 
is a right and a wrong way to do it, 
just as tnere is with everything else. 
H. w. 0 . 
A good season’s work is that of the 
C jrnell crew of experts, who by effective 
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