FARMING ITEMS.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3016, 24 February 1881, Page 3

FARMING ITEMS.

A gardener of experience says : —After trying for a number of year 3 almost in vain to raise good celery on ordinary garden soil, I finally borrowed the use of a little patch of reclaimed swamp land —deep black muck, well drainod, but moist, and for the two past seasons have grown on it very fine celery with but little labour So I shnll not again attempt to grow this vegetable on common garden soil without some cheap and easy method of irrigation. Market gardeners generally undertand this.—Exchange. Some time since the Christian Union called attention to the fact that an experienced farrier of England reported that horses did better without than with shoes. A writer in The Times has been trying the experiment and thus reports : —" When my pony's shoes were worn out, I had them removed, and gave him a month's rest at grass, with an occasional drive of a mile or two on the highroad while his hoofs were hardening. The result at first seemed doubtful. The hoof was a thin shell, and kopt chipping away until it had worked down beyond the holes of the nails by which, the shoes had been fastened. After this the hoof grew thick and hard, quite unlike what it had been before, I now put the pony to full work and he stands it well. He is more sure footed ; Lis tread is almost noiseless ; his hoofs are in no danger from rough hands of the farrier; and the change altogether has been a clear gain without anything to set off against it. My pony, I may add, was between four and five years old—rising four, I fancy, is the correct phraee. He had been regularly shod up to the present year." Attend to the grapes as they ripen. Bag any bunoh.es that are required to be kept for a month or so longer, when they will fetch double the price. Put them in a net, as they damp off in paper bags. Eemove all rotten fruit from under the trees as they drop and bury them deep in the ground. By so doing thousand of fly pests are destroyed. Look to this if the fly pest is wanted to be got rid of. Look out now for the orange hug and moth at this season, and kill them. They must be' hand picked, the bug by day, and the moth at night, or else they will cause a large- number of the first set and best fruit to drop. Prepare ground for new strawberry beans. The time for planting will be next month. Remove all suckers that are not required from the raspberries. The newly planted ones with me fruited very fairly considering the season, and only just planted. I think this most excellent fruit can be grown •with profit in some of the gardens on the Downs. A moist but not wet situation suits them best. Bemove all suckers from the newly planted fruit trees and all tiee from young grafted and budded trees. If growing, tie them to sticks or they will break off with the strong winds. Be careful and gather the fruit for sending away, and not bruise it. If this is not attended to, half or more of the fruit will be rotten before it reaches its destination.

The past thirty years have ■witnessed many agricultural follies, beginning with -the "morns multicuils " fever, a little more than three decades ago, the Shanghai fever, the Shorthorn fever, and, more lately, the poultry fever generally. But, as it is only by disease that we are brought to appreciate ' heplth, these morbid excitements may have resulted in some good. "Without desiring to create or pub in motion another "boom," I (says a correspondent of a Transatlantic comtemporary), wish to draw attention, as a specific branch of agriculture, to the raising of ducks and geese for profit. Many old farmers, and perhaps some young ones, may give a sniff of the nose at this, but a little experience has satisfied me that there is more money in ducts and geese to the farmer than in hens or turkeys. The duck is generally esteemed as a table fowl, and it only needs testing to make the goose the peer of the turkey upon the Christinas board. As an egg-producer there is no fowl that will compare with ducks. They bring a better price than chickens, cost no more to raise under fair conditions, yield a fine crop of feathers besides. The goose produces about the same number of eggs as a turkey, can be raised at half the cost, brings nearly the same price in market, and yields abundantly of fine feathers. The goose, like the cow, makes its living chiefly on grass, while the cluck is the hog of the poultry yard. It will eat anything from the child's glass marble to a rattlesnake, and what is better it seems to digest everything it swallows. The proper conditions for raising these fowls profitably are a low house surrounded by a corral sufficient to turn dogs, with a pasture proportioned to the size of the flock, one acre to fifty geeae. The pasture should be divided with four apartments. Four-feet laths cut in two will make a fence tall enough. Shallow cast-iron bowk surrounded by picket, so that they can only get the head and neck in, make the best receptacles for water, or, if convenient, a shallow running spring. The younglings of either geese or ducks must be carefully fed until three weelo old, and the best feed is light bread made from " shorts" of course flour soaked in cold water. The next two weeks their range should be blue gras3 free from weeds or anything likely to trip them, as they are easiiy thrown upon their backs and can rarely get up without help. Of the varieties, any of the lai'ge Toulouse, Bremen, or Chinese geese, and of ducks, the Muscovy, Black Cayuga, Pekin, or any large breed that may suit the fancy. —Irish Farmer.