REPAIRS AND IMPROVEMENTS.

Globe, Volume XXIV, Issue 2638, 20 September 1882, Page 3

REPAIRS AND IMPROVEMENTS.

To keep a farm in repair, requires the careful attention of the owner from the very day it is put into use. Trees, &0., that are set for ornament or shade, improve from the hour they begin to grow : but pretty much everything eleo upon the farm begins to show decay from the day when it is exposed to the sun and rain. The best of \:-\irt parts with muoh of its lustre in a month, begins to fade in three, is quite dull in six months, and requires renewing in a year. New pine board fences look fresh, and enliven the farm scenery for a time, but all farm fixtures are so exposed to the elements that indications of decay set in at the start, and this tendenoy never diminishes. Hence, with these facts before him, it stands the farmer in hand to build with a view to the natural tendenoy in buildings and fixtures to vary from the perpendicular and to get rusty. Gate posts and fence posts that are not at first set strictly upright, unless changed, ever afterwards remain so. Inexpensive buildings receive more or less injury from the foundation at any point becoming defective; henoe it is better to gu»id against a corner going down before the structure is placed upon it. The sagging gates or the untidy bars affect the appearance of all in the immediate vioinity. The gate post is never too deeply or too firmly planted, and for a heavy gate hardly any depth or firmness of soil about the binge post will absolutely insure against sagging. But a heavy oak stick, or three inoh plank, plaoed just beneath the surface, with an end against oaoh post, will, as a rule, hold the hinge-post perpendioular and the gate level. The impressions upon the minds of railway travellers as they pass through a farming district vary as much as those of the lover of art, as he passes from a piece by one of the first masters to the merest daub by the scene painter. Farms at best, as they are usually traversed by railroad traoks—no regard being had to lines —are seen at a disadvantage. Yet if fences are erect and straight, and afford a reasonably sure barrier against trespassing animals, the buildings kept in repair, and the immediate premises kept dear of rubbish, if the strength of the land is not unduly taken by slipshod tillage, the manure pile in the meantime being left to rot in the barn yard, impressions reoeived from any view will be favorable.

But perhaps the neglect to drain wet places npon the farm is bis common a fault as any other, and one that shows the want of neatness in fields, and entails lessened profits with unvarying certainty. When the team oan be driven, with a load, over ground hitherto too wet and soft to bear an empty waggon, then it is evident that drainage has been made available. No land should be left about the corners or other parts of fields in suoh condition that water will stand long enough upon it to prevent a good crop of corn being grown thereon. As it has been proved possible to redeem impassable swamps, there can be no reasonable exouse for continuing to tolerate unsightly angular parcels of wet ground in enolosed fiolds, kept either for tillage or for grass. It is said that a man may generally be known by tho oompany he keeps ; so the business oharaoter of the owner of the farm on the right of the road, or that one on the left, may be pretty oorrectly estimated at a glanee, even from the window of the car moviDg at high speed. The furrows being turned by the moviDg team, whether these are straight and deep or crooked and shallow, are facts that, disconnected from all others, have a pointed meaning. The man who reclaims wet lands upon his farm, stacks his straw in a olean well-sheltered barn yard, to be ated as feed and bedding, and to become

incorporated with tho winter's manure, keeps hii fences ereot and his gates from sagging, will give in these things evidences of thrift, and show premises strongly in contract with the farm of the mau over the way, who habitually neglcots to attend to either of these very important dotaihj.