1 AvG., 1901.} QUEENSLAND AGRICULTURAL JOURNAL. 175 
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Agriculture. 
, FARMERS’ WOOL. 
Farmers who shear a few hundred sheep annually will doubtless appreciate 
the following points, which the wool-buyers expect to be observed :— 
1. The sheep should not be allowed to run too long after washing before 
being clipped, as this means in effect getting the wool back into 
greasy condition. 
2. Nor should they be clipped while wet, as this takes away the live- 
liness from the fibre and causes the wool to rot. 
3. They should not be clipped in dirty places, such as barns littered 
with chaff and straw, and other matters, which get into the staple 
and cause endless trouble and annoyance. The cost of this fault 
to the user is serious, as it is often impossible to get this foreign 
: matter out without the use of chemicals. 
4. When the fleece is wound, no clags of earth nor dung-should be left 
on the fleece, nor put in whilst winding. 
5. No locks, tailings, skin-wool, black, nor cots should be wrapped up 
inside washed fleeces. 
6. The fleeces should be tied up with bands made by twisting a portion 
of the fleece itself. Strings composed of vegetable matter such as 
hemp, jute, &e., are bad and ought not to be used. 
The most careful manipulation by the manufacturer often fails to detect 
small pieces which do not make their appearance until the cloth is dyed, 
because the dyes which are required for wool will not do for vegetable matter. 
Pieces of cloth are often damaged in this way to very aggravating extent. 
SPRAYING VEGETABLES WITH PARIS GREEN. 
It is generally considered a dangerous practice to spray vegetables, such 
as cabbages and cauliflowers, with any poisonous material, but experiments made 
in the United States at the Colorado Experiment Station appear to point to the 
absolute harmlessness of such spraying for the purpose of killing worms in 
eabbages. Where the green is dusted from. a bag in the proportion of 1 oz. to 
- 100 oz. of flour and just enough applied to make a slight show on the leaves— 
say 1 oz. of the mixture to twenty-eight heads of cabbage—the worms will all 
be killed in the course of two or three days, while the average amount of 
poison on each cabbage will be about one-seventh of a grain. Fully one-half 
of the powder will fall on the outside leaves and on the ground, and thus an 
individual would have to eat about twenty-eight cabbages in order to consume 
a poisonous dose of arsenic, even if the balance of the poison remained after 
cooking. 
DISC-HARROWING OF LUCERNE. , 
Mr. H. M. Cottrell, manager of the Experiment Station, Manhattan, 
Kansas, says that disking is of as much value to lucerne (alfalfa, the Americans 
call it), as cultivation is to corn, and he gives an account of his experience with 
a poor stand of lucerne which was sown in the dry year of 1894. In 1897 this 
alfalfa was heavily pastured by hogs. The hogs were taken off early in the 
fall, and a heavy growth of crab grass came up. The crab grass was so thick 
and the stand of alfalfa so thin that it was not worth keeping. -Late in March, 
1898, this field was harrowed with a disc-harrow, the dises sharp and set at 
as great an angle as possible. It was immediately cross disked with the dises 
set the same way. The ground was thoroughly pulverised, and the alfalfa 
apparently destroyed. It soon started, branched out thickly, and we made 
three good cuttings from that field that summer. 
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