Farm and Garden.

King Country Chronicle, Volume III, Issue 138, 11 March 1909, Page 4

Farm and Garden.

Don't forj:< l that ducks are very nervous. Make strangers tread softly for a stampede means dead ducks and lost flesh.

Don't keep geese with other fowls. Remember the gander can whip a dog, and he might nip the head off your favourite prize winner.

Beetroot in moderation is a great food for poultry. They enjoy it immensely. It acts in many ways—good for liver complaints and is useful in assisting egg production, besides giving the egg a good flavour.

Poultry are said to be very fond of wattle seeds,which add to the lustre of the plumage, fallng as they do during the early moulting season. Fowls are also said to have a fondness for the for the berries of African boxthorn.

Indian runner ducks should commence to lay at not more than five and a half months. Usually they commence from two to four weeks earlier.

Not a few dairy farmers think that the "giving down "or "holding up" of milk by the cow is a voluntary act. They fancy that the udder is a vessel filled with milk and that the cow releases it or withholds it as she chooses; but the udder is a manufactory; it is filled with blood from which the milk is manufactured while the milking goes on. This process is controlled by the cow's nervous system. When she is excited or in any way disturbed, as by stranger, or by taking away her calf, or any other cause, the process is arrested, and the milk will not flow. The whole process is as involuntary as is the digestion, and is disturbed or arrested in about the same way. Yet there are milkers who are certain that the cow holds her milk because she wants to, that they proceed to punish her, thus making matters worse.

Among the best fool for a brood sow is coarse wheat middlings or reground bran, or bran and middlings mixed with half and half, made into a stiff mass with skim milk if possible, and if not with slops or water. Sows should have access to a box filled with

a mixture of six parts charcoal, two parts wood ashes, with two pounds of salt and half a pound of copperas to each bushel. The brood sow should be fed just enough to be kept thrifty and strong, but not to make her fat. She should have all the water she wants at all time. It is also desirable that the sow be handled so as to be very tame and quiet. If sows are so treated good litters of pigs may be anticipated.

The richest part of any manure is that which water will wash out.

The better food you feed the more care-'ul you should be of the manure.

Agriculture is an art as well as a business, and the real farmer is an artist.

The lay of the old speckled hen is more inspiring to the farmer than the lay of the spimg poet.