CALENDARIAL MEMORANDA FOR DECEMBER. 
475 
CALENDARIAL MEMORANDA FOR DECEMBER. 
Kitchen Garden. —Protecting the growing and stored crops from 
the severity of the weather, is a daily and principal task in this depart¬ 
ment at this dead season of the year: it is also a month of preparation 
for the execution of much business to be done hereafter. Manuring, 
trenching, or double-digging vacant pieces of ground; collecting and 
turning composts; preparing dung for hotbeds, &c., are all the ordinary 
employments of the month. 
Peas. If the weather be open, and the soil pretty dry, another 
sowing of early peas may be put in. This is particularly necessary 
if the first sowings be cut off, or to succeed them if they be not. 
Beans. Another sowing of mazagan or early long pods may now 
be put in; for, though they may not make much progress during the 
shortest days, they will flower and produce pods earlier than if sown a 
month later. Be careful to guard both beans and peas against the 
depredations of mice or other pests. 
Ice-House.— When frost sets in, and the ice upon the ponds has 
become of sufficient thickness, preparations must be made for filling 
the house. This business commences by clearing the house of all the 
old damp straw with which the last year’s ice was covered, sweeping 
out the passages, and carting away all the leaves, straw, and other litter 
from about the entrance. 
A sufficient quantity of trussed wheat straw must be brought, and 
laid near the entrance, but not directly before it. The trusses, which 
usually weigh about forty pounds each, should be halved, that is, 
divided into two, and bound separately. This makes the straw more 
manageable for lining the walls of the house, and for covering the ice 
when the house is full, and for filling the passage within the outer 
door. 
A dozen or two of heavy clubs or beaters, having crutch-like heads, 
or bent like the segment of a circle, should also be provided for 
breaking and pounding the ice, together with shovels, iron-headed 
rakes, and dung-drags for drawing the ice off the water, and loading 
it into carts. 
Filling the ice-house should be done, if possible, in one day. All 
the labourers about the place should be employed, with three or four 
pairs of horses, and large carts, according to the distance of the pond 
from the ice-house. 
