Iht RURAL NEW-YORKER 
901 
Garden and Farm Notes 
Separator for Picking Over Peas and 
Beans 
I noticed an article in The R. N.-Y. 
last Fall describing a machine for separ¬ 
ating wheat and vetch seed. It occurred 
to me after reading the article that it 
would be a good thing with w T hich to clean 
field peas. I made one such machine, 
measuring 6^x2% ff., and it w'orked 
with the best of success, taking out every 
particle of dirt, lumps of dirt, straws, 
half peas; in fact, cleaned as well as by 
hand. I also used it for cleaning beans 
with, and it took out all the dirt and the 
worst of the discolored beans. They were 
white kidney beans. It will practically 
pick over pea beans. What are the 
methods used where large quantities of 
beans are picked over or cleaned? 
Vermont. frank t,. webster. 
R. N.-Y.—The Cornell Experiment 
Station at Ithaca, N. Y., has a bulletin 
on bean growing that will help you. Send 
also to the Michigan Station at East 
Lansing. Mechanical graders are used 
by the bean growers, and hand sorting is 
practiced. The beans are carried slowly 
along on an endless apron. Women and 
girls stand beside this apron and pick out 
the inferior beans as they pass on. 
Treatment of Asparagus 
I have a patch of asparagus I have 
been cutting 20 years. It has done well, 
but I find this year it is small and 
spindly. It is planted 4 ft. apart. I 
keep it clean and manure it every Winter, 
harrow it over in the Spring, keep it 
worked while I am cutting. About June 
15 I took the two-horse plow this 
Spring, and plowed a furrow upon the 
row, then harrowed it all over. I tore 
loose a lot of roots. Is that the cause of 
its being so spindly, or is 20 years the 
Yesterday I rode out with a friend to 
see his farm. I was surprised to see 
that his tenant was in the old ruts. His 
young corn had been bar-plowed, as it is 
called. That is, the land side of the plow 
was run close to the corn, and the soil 
piled in ridges between the rows. This 
threw up the soil to dry it and let the 
dry air down on the roots of the corn to 
dry the soil still deeper. I urged him to 
have the mid-row ridges leveled and to 
take the plows out of the cornfield. I 
have never had any use for a moldboard 
plow after the corn is planted. My friend 
went across the field where the plows 
were running, and came back with a 
handful of moist earth, saying that he was 
pleased to see them turning moist earth 
in this drought. The fact is they were 
robbing the soil of moisture by going 
down and turning the moist earth to di - y 
out, and doing a lot of needless work that 
really was damaging the crop. A two- 
horse cultivator with weeder teeth at. that 
stage of the corn would have done better 
work in retaining the moisture below, es¬ 
pecially in a light, sandy soil. It is hard 
to get many farmers to use their brains in 
their work. They simply follow old hab¬ 
its handed down from the wooden plow 
era without thinking for themselves. The 
crops of cantaloupes and cucumbers are 
important here, but the fields look very 
backward. The frosts caused a great deal 
of replanting. Here the middle of June 
the cantaloupe vines had not started to 
run. In my garden the eautaloupes have 
nearly covered the rows, and are setting 
melons, and I was fortunate enough to 
VETCH5££D 
FRAME tQFT. 10H& 
'ILER 
f CRANKF0V 
,.TORN!NC CAN MS 
ibBur towards.; 
■ TOPOf/NU/NG. 
\etchbinJ 
3FFW/0F CANVAS ENDLESS OUT 
FRAMC- 
Device for Separating Vetch from Rye 
life of it? Would kainit help it next 
Spring, or would you give it more salt? I 
have 8,€00 roots. I have a patch of 
4,000 roots three years old; it is fine this 
Spring. What is better for it, salt or 
kainit? The first patch is very small and 
thick in the row. I have used lots of 
manure, but not much salt. J. M. P. 
Reisterstown, Md. 
Many gardeners make the mistake in 
their treatment of asparagus of l'etting 
the bed alone after cutting stops. The 
important time to prepare the bed to 
make stout shoots is after cutting stops. 
Here I stop cutting the first'of .Tune. In 
Baltimore County about June 10 will be 
a good stopping time. Then from that 
till frost is the time to fertilize and cul¬ 
tivate clean, for the greater the Summer 
growth the stouter the stalks next Spring. 
Give the bed a dressing of sulphate of 
ammonia and cultivate absolutely clean. 
Kainit at rate of 500 lbs. an acre can be 
used to advantage on light sandy soils, 
and will be of advantage <on the gray 
lands about Reistertown. It will carry 
an abundance of salt. I try to get the 
strongest possible growth during' the 
Summer, and my stalks in Spring are 
always stouter than any that I see in 
the bunches on our market. Then when 
growth stops in the Fall cut off the tops 
and cover the whole bed thickly with good 
stable manure, and let it lie till Spring 
before turning under. I once had an old 
bed that was thickly matted. I cut 
trenches through it two feet apart each 
way, and removed all the roots in these 
trenches, and filled the trenches level 
with old fine rotten manure. The growth 
of shoots the next Spring from the blocks 
of roots left was wonderful and a bunch 
of them placed 1 in a restaurant window 
attracted great attention. Feeding and 
good cultivation are the need of as¬ 
paragus. W. F. MASSEIY. 
Notes from a Maryland Garden 
The part of my garden under the Skin¬ 
ner pipe line has a flourishing lot of 
plauts, tomatoes, eggplants, pepper, cu¬ 
cumbers, etc. The remainder of the gar¬ 
den is suffering for moisture, for we have 
had no rain since early May, aud it is now 
past the middle of June. But this sandy 
soil stands a drought remarkably when 
not stirred too deeply in cultivation. 
get a stand from the early April planting, 
and had but few hills to replant. 
I have been making some experiments 
with the sulphate of ammonia as a side 
application during the growth of plants. 
Its effects are not apparent so quickly 
as with nitrate of soda, of course, but 
they are very strong. I would assume 
that a previous use of lime on the land 
would make a difference. I have never 
made a general liming of my garden, for 
there are many crops I grow which pre¬ 
fer some acidity in the soil. The sulphate 
of ammonia is being produced in immense 
quantities in this country in the making 
of coke for the steel works, and it should 
compete in price very easily with the ni¬ 
trate of soda. In fact, the prices of all 
fertilizer material are still entirely too 
high when compared with crop values. 
The Early Irish potatoes are in the 
cellar, and. a very abundant yield of very 
small potatoes. So far as I have seen 
all the potatoes grown here this season 
are under normal size. I have some 
ground waiting for the late crop, but do 
not want to plant them in the hot dust, 
and am waiting for rain. 
I have in my long life seen many fool 
things done in gardening, but the silliest 
thing I ever saw was done with a field of 
sweet potatoes I saw yesterday. The 
plants had started to run slightly, and the 
man had cut every leaf off over thousands 
of plants. Asking why, I was told that 
he wanted the plants to grow upright be¬ 
fore running. It seemed doubtful in this 
dry weather that such leafless stumps 
could, survive. The lack of evaporation 
may save them, but the crop is damaged 
beyond recovery. This was on the same 
farm where he was plowing up moist soil 
in the cornfield. And yet these people 
will fill a hall at a farmers’ institute and 
will go home imagining they know a great 
deal better about everything than the 
speakers they have listened to, but whose 
advice they have no idea of adopting. 
One of the Baltimore papers a few days 
ago boasted that the Maryland farmers 
are raising more hogs than ever. But 
that reporter was probably a young man, 
and does not remember the days when our 
farmers fed all their corn to feed the hogs, 
aud all the hogs to feed the negroes. 
W. F.MASSEY. 
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