Vol. LXVII, No. 3072. 
NEW YORK, DECEMBER 12, 1908. 
WEEKLY, $1.00 PER YEAR. 
HELP FOR THE HENS. 
How They Work a Corn Crop. 
I am going to start in the poultry business, and I 
would like to know whether incubator chickens hatched 
in April or March will lay the following Winter, and if 
chicks hatched in May will lay in Winter. 
Ulster Co., N. Y. w\ r. 
It would be almost impossible for anyone to write 
an inquiry and give less data upon which to base an 
answer than W. R. has in the above. In the first 
place, what kind of chickens has he? If any of the 
Leghorns, they may be expected to lay, if they have 
had plenty of feed of the right kinds, in five to six 
months from the time they are hatched, that is, if 
they have had no sickness or setback of any kind. If 
he keeps any of the American breeds—Rocks, Wyan- 
dottes, or R. I. Reds—and they have been raised un¬ 
der favorable conditions, they will lay when six to 
seven months old. If he keeps the heavy breeds, the 
Asiatics, Brahmas, Cochins, or Langshans, it will 
take still longer for them to mature and begin lay¬ 
ing, seven to eight months. In all 
these breeds there are exceptional 
cases where single birds will com¬ 
mence laying a month or six 
weeks before the rest do, and 
usually these early layers do not 
grow as large as 'their mates, but 
the early layers generally make the 
best layers of the flock. The feed 
and care which the chicks have 
had will have a great deal to do 
with “when they will commence 
laying.” I have had an illustra¬ 
tion of that in my White Wyan- 
dottes this year. I took 25 April- 
hatched chicks that had been kept 
in one of my scratching sheds un¬ 
til about six weeks old, and put 
them in a little house near my 
barn, where they could have free 
range on grass and around the 
barn; in fact they have had the 
run of about seven acres all Sum¬ 
mer. I kept near their house 
water and a pan of cracked corn 
and wheat. The chicks would 
come a dozen times a day and 
eat a little, then go off. At nighl, 
they would fill their crops full. I 
gave them no beef scraps or wet 
mash, assuming that they would 
find meat enough in the bugs, 
grasshoppers and worms they 
would get. They made a fine growth, the cockerels 
being the largest of any I have, but none of the 
pullets has laid yet; while some that have been fed 
a wet mash with plenty of beef scraps in it, have 
been laying for two months. One became broody, 
but was broken up by taking her off the nest two or 
three times, and thus diverting her mind. 
These last mentioned ones have been yarded, but 
the yard encloses over an acre with a strip of corn 
50 feet wide by 300 feet long, a strip of grass about 
same size (I cut two loads of hay off it), and a 
strip of Dwarf Essex rape 30 by 200 feet. The 
chicks had a good time in that corn all Summer. It 
was shade from the sun and shelter from hawks, and 
while they scratched down a very little of the corn, 
and later stripped the corn off a few ears, yet it was 
such a good thing to do for the chicks that I purpose 
planting that strip with corn as long as I raise chicks 
on that lot. And that corn is worth an article by 
itself. As an acre contains over 41,800 square feet, 
this strip, 50 by 300 feet, was 5,900 square feet less 
than a half acre. On this strip I had 87 bushels of 
ears. Around here 87 bushels is considered a good 
yield for an acre. This land raised barley one year, 
oats two years, and corn two years. Not a pound of 
commercial fertilizer has ever been used on it. It 
was prepared for the corn in this manner: A very 
light coat of barnyard manure was plowed under, then 
disk-harrowed. Two boys plowed furrows each way 
for the corn, but got them too deep, six inches I 
should think. Hen manure was thrown with a shovel 
all along these furrows, and the corn dropped by 
hand and covered with a hoe. It was about three 
or four inches below the level when covered. It was 
cultivated and hoed twice, and the corn grew so fast 
that weeds had no show; the ground is as bare and 
free from weeds even now, as the middle of the road. 
Whether that is the result of the chicks running in 
the corn I do not know. In the long dry time last 
Summer, when corn blades near here were curled up 
by the dry weather, not a leaf on this whole piece 
curled. It was a 10-rowed flint corn, not a dent 
corn, with very wide but not deep kernels. If W. R, 
wants to raise corn as well as chickens, this article 
may give him some information about both. 
Connecticut. george a. cosgrove. 
Harvesting with Hens. 
That article in a recent number of The R. N.-Y. on 
“hogging off” corn, struck a responsive chord very 
near home, for if there is any State where the farm 
labor problem is more acute than in Connecticut the 
farmers there certainly deserve sympathy. Here fac¬ 
tories are scattered over nearly every county, and 
they offer employment at wages that current market 
prices will not allow the farmers to duplicate. The 
continued and apparently permanent rise in the prices 
of staple grains has played havoc with the profits of 
ns poultrymen in late years, and without doubt it is 
merely a question of time when the “poultry plants” 
here in the East must give way to “poultry farms,” 
where at least a good part of the ration shall be home¬ 
grown. At present* the movement in that direction 
has only included corn, little having been attempted 
with the small grains. My first efforts were with 
oats, which were fed in the bundle with gratifying 
results. But when I got down to the bottom of the 
row where they had been stored, the accumulation 
of chaff and hulls told a Story of riotous luxury for 
the rodents, I resolved to “rat-proof” the loft, but 
when I came to carefully estimate the cost, that was 
simply out of the question. Finally an inspiration, 
came as I caught some chickens working destruction 
to the garden, and realized that it was only a case of 
misdirected energy. Henceforth the vandals should 
be converted into slaves. The following Spring I 
planted about an acre of old ground to a mixture of 
bald barley, Spring wheat, and oats, sowing it in 
drills 10 inches apart. As soon as the shoots had 
grown enough to be a little tough, the growing chicks 
in their roosting coops, were distributed along the 
edge of the field, and fed with hoppers until the grain 
began to mature. The barley ripened first—that is, it 
disappeared first—the oats next, and the wheat last. 
Throughout the harvest the youngsters were given 
nothing else but scraps and water, but they grew 
better than any I had ever raised before. 
The next year, in order to gain 
time on the Spring work, I 
planted Winter wheat in place of 
the usual cover crops of rye, and 
my only regret was that there was 
not more. Every grain disap¬ 
peared before the ground froze, 
and repeated inspection failed to 
locate a single kernel that lay on 
the ground long enough to ger¬ 
minate. This season I have planted 
a small percentage of vetch with 
the wheat, anticipating that next 
year while the fowls are harvest¬ 
ing the latter, the ground will be¬ 
come heavily seeded with vetch, 
and after the Fall rains or per¬ 
haps sooner, this will come up and 
furnish a good supply of green 
food until snow flies. This idea 
was suggested by the way the 
fowls enthused over a volunteer 
crop of vetch that appeared last 
year in the stubble. Apparently 
they did not care for the seed, nor 
for the vines until rather late in 
the Fall, and then they proceeded 
to make up lost time. 
I wish that farm conditions per¬ 
mitted the keeping of accounts 
sufficiently complete to show the 
revenue per acre under this man¬ 
agement, but the only approxima¬ 
tion I can give is this: The first year, with one acre 
of the mixed grains, the feed bill fell off $34.50 dur¬ 
ing the harvest, comparing with the previous year, 
although grain prices were averaging materially 
higher. Beyond that I can only say that on our small 
stony fields, where the western machines are out of 
the question, I believe this solution for the labor 
problem capable of great development. 
Connecticut. c. m. gallup. 
Chickens, Bugs and Blight. 
On May 15 I finished planting one-half acre of pota¬ 
toes, partly with Early Ohio, and the rest with a late 
red potato known as Mortgage Lifter. The soil was a 
rather light, well-drained loam, used for corn the 
previous year. I used 600 pounds high grade potato 
manure, sown in five-inch furrows, three feet apart, 
and thoroughly worked into soil. The seed was cut 
three to four eyes per piece, well dusted with sulphur, 
dropped 15 inches apart in furrows and covered by 
hand. Cultivation was started soon as rows could be 
seen; in all the field was gone over with a weeder 
twice, cultivated three times and hand-hoed twice. 
CHICKENS AND POTATOES GROWN TOGETHER. Fig. 447. 
