AGRICULTURAL BREVITIES.

Globe, Volume XXII, Issue 2102, 18 November 1880, Page 3

AGRICULTURAL BREVITIES.

Wire with barbs upon it is selling wonderfully in the States —the daily manufacture is now 200,0001 b. weight. Crops of fine wheat are grown in Manchuria on lands so permeated with salt as to form white incrustations on the surface. India-rubber makes a serviceable covering for the bit of a tender-mouthed horse ; each side of the bit should be protected with a stiff circular piece of leather. An inventive genius filled a small tarlton sack with a spoonful of cayenne pepper and tacked it over the rat-hole. When the rat bounced out his eyes got peppered. The whole tribe next day crossed over to a neighbor's. Collect all the old bones about the farm, or what you can pick up about the bush, make a heap of them with earth and wood ashes, and throw on all the soapsuds and house slops, and you will soon have a heap of excellent manure which contains no seeds and weeds. Cut wheat early, for if over-ripe there is much more waste.

For greasing waggons use castor oil in summer and sperm oil in winter. When the oil is sticky clean with turpentine. If hens get into the habit of eating eggs take enough bran and corn-meal of equal parts for one feeding, and enough vinegar warmed to make the meal sufficiently wet for the hens to eat. Mix together and feed it to the hens. Repeat this once the same day. There is no kind of dried fruit in such brisk demand in the American market as raspberries. One hundred quarts will make 301 b of dried fruit. Common black pepper sprinkled on cabbages kills insects and worms. A few drops of sulphurio acid in _ a plaintain, dock, or any perennial weed, will kill it. Fowl manure is a valuable fertiliser, and every particle should be saTed. The floors of chicken houses should be swept every week, and the deposits barrelled for future use, adding a little gypsum or dry earth to retain the ammonia. Diluted carbolic acid is a eomplete exterminator of insects infesting crops. But it is destructive to plant life unless it is sufficiently diluted with water —one pint of carbolic acid to 100 quarts of water.