Farm and Garden.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 41, 4 November 1871, Page 9

Farm and Garden.

A SOUTH AMERICAN POULTRY YARD. I propose to describe a poultry farm, where fowls are kept by the thousand, whose proprietor counts his gains therefrom It is situated in the southern extremity of Chili, South America, where the rainy season, of six months’ duration, is as detrimental to the well-being of all fowl kind as the rigors of our own winters, and where great care and skill is very essential to satisfactory results. Senor Don San Euentes commenced his operations in poultry with a stock of 200 .hens and eight cocks, to which he has added thereto, by natural increase from year to yeai-, until now he has somewhere in the vicinity of 6000. Their range is unlimited, as his farm covers 3000 euadras, equal to 7500 acres. To every 50 hens and two cocks is given a house of their own, of which there are 600 to 700 on the place. These are placed 200 feet apart, each way, thus isolating one lot from, the other. These houses are very cheap affairs, and are made by erecting two forked posts, 8 feet long and distant from each other 15 feet. On these rests the l’idge pole. On both sides of the centre post, 10 feet distant, a trench is dug, a foot in depth. Then small poles are placed for rafters, one end in the trench and the other tied to the ridge-pole, 2 feet apart, then another set of poles tied crossways, also 2 feet equidistant, and the framework is complete. This is covered over with thatch, which is found in plentiful abundance, and to be had for the cutting. The only framework about the house are the doors at the ends, both of which are 4 by 6, and contain each a window, pivoted in the centre of the sash, to be opened or shut as the requirements of ventilation demand. Each house has its complement of 20 boxes for laying placed under the leaves, and partly concealed by bundles of straw. Near the family residence is a large building, devoted to the storing of grain and eggs ; nursery for sick hens, a long room for hatching, and another for slaughtering purposes. In the sick room is arranged a series of boxes, each one large enough for the comfort and convenience of its solitary occupant, who is there placed and treated for its malady with as much care as if its value was dollars instead of cents, and with such skill, that the ratio of deaths has been lin 280. The sitting department is also provided with boxes, some 300 in number. Here all are brought from their respective coops as soon as their incubating propensity shows itself, and placed upon their quota of eggs. Food, water, and a large supply of sand and ashes are provided, and the sitting hen not allowed to leave the room until she takes her young brood with her. The clutches are then “ doubled up,” that is, two broods to one hen, and the chickenless one sent back to her coop to resume her egg laying. As soon as the young chicks aro discarded by their mother they are taken to their future home, fifty in each lob, and the old ones back to their respective localities. The fowls are fed three times per day, and their diet so arranged as to always present a variety, although oats is their staple article of food, and always before them in unlimited quantity. To-day it will be Indian meal, made into a stiff dough, and given hot ; to-morrow, barley ; next day, boiled potatoes mashed and mixed with pork scraps and bran, corn broken in a coarse mill, and so on in rotation ; adding from time to time horse-flesh, or some other cheap and inexpensive animal food. Burned bones, pounded shells, and lime are supplied in profusion. These with what they gather on their foraging expeditions, produce a wonderful supply of eggs. During the rainy season they are not allowed to leave the coop, except the day be exceedingly pleasant, and then only fora short time. They appear to bear their confinement remarkably well and with hardly any decrease in the quantity of eggs. While confined they are allowed an extra allowance of animal food. The attendants requisite to the care of the 6000 fowls are one man and four boys. The houses are thoroughly cleaned once a week, and the interiors whitewashed every three months. Every morning each lot of fowls undergoes a careful inspection, and any one found moping or otherwise indisposed is immediately taken to the hospital, and caredfor; and seldom is it bub what the indisposition is cured, and she takes her place back again as well as evei\ At evening the boys go the rounds to gather up the proceeds off the day’s labors, which will average 200 dozen per day, the year through. “ Killing time” takes place twice during the year—-in the spring, and again at the commencement of therainy season. All the early chickens are thus disposed of at a good pi’ice, and, the two year-old fowls decapitated to give room for the younger broods as they are supposed to be past profitable service after the second year. The profit from one year’s business amounted to 11,000 dollars. The sales were 72,000 dozen of eggs, and nearly 20,000 chickens and 2 year-jolds. Mr San Fuentes expresses himself as being perfectly satisfied with the result obtained, and intends to double his stock each year, until every 200 feet of his extensive farm has its house of 50 tenants. —People’s Practical Poultry Book, New York,

. HOW TO CURE HAMS. J The following receipts for curing 10001 bof | pork hams have carried off the premiums offered by the Maryland State Agricultural [Society First Premium.—Mix 2£lb saltpetre finely powdered, half a bushel fine salt, 31b brown sugar, half a gallon of molasses. Rub the meat with the mixture. Pack with skin down. Turn over once a week, and add a little salt. After being down three or four weeks take out, wash, and hang up two or three weeks until it is dry. Then smoke with hickory three or four weeks. Then bag or pack away in a cool place —not a cellar—in chaff or hay. Second.—The meat, after being cut out, must be rubbed piece by piece with very finelypowdered saltpetre on the flesh side; and where the leg is cut off a tablespoonful (not heaped) to each ham, a desert-spoonful to each shoulder and about half that quantity to each middling and jowl. This must he rubbed in. Then salt it by packing a thin coat of salt on the flesh side of each piece, say half-inch thick, Pack the pieces on a scaffolding, or on a floor with strips of plank laid a few inches apart all over it (that is under the meat). The pieces must be placed skin-side down in the following order :—First layer, hams ; second, shoulders ; third, jowls ; fourth, middlings. Take the spare ribs out of the middlings. The meat must lie in this wise :—Six weeks if the weather is mild, eight if very cold, the brine being allowed to run off freely.

Third.—Half a bushel fine salt, 31b brown sugar, 2Jlb saltpetre, have a gallon best molasses. Mix these ingredients together ; then rub each piece well with the mixture until all beabsorded. The meat must be taken out of the pickle once a week for six weeks. The two first times the meat is taken out there is to be a plate of alum salt added to the pickle once a week for six weeks.

Fourth.-T wo and ahalf pound saltpetre dried and finely powdered, half a bushel best Liverpool salt, 31b brown sugar, and half a gallon molasses. Mix all in a vessel; mb the meat well with same, and pack with skin down. The above is the exact amount required for lOOOlbs ofpoi'k. After being in salt three or four weeks take out, wash clean the pieces, dry and hang it up for smoking. Three weeks is sufficient to smoke them thoroughly, by fire made of hickory wood. When smoked take down and bag, or pack away in dry chaff or cut straw. Examine them occasionally, and if found to be at all damp renew the packing with dry material.

GREEN FOOD, MACHINERY, STACKYARDS, THICK SOWING, Ac. The longer I farm the more lam convinced that the turning out and roaming at large system will come to an end, especially as land gets scarcer and dearer. It is cheaper and better to bring the food to the animal than the animal to the food, because in the latter case he is permitted to trample upon it, excrete upon it and lie upon it. One of the largest and most successful farmers that I know has always folded his sheep and cut the grass for them —one man, a lad, —and a horse chaff cutter being on the field, there feeding the sheep with green grass chaff, mixed with cake, &c. Although seventy-seven, he is and always has been, among the very best root and corn growers among my acquaintances, on an area of 1500 acres. Green tares, clover, &c, are all passed through the chaff cutter for my horses and cattle, the corn ground, the root pulped. One trial will prove the fact, and put money into the pockets of my agricultural friends. Our sheep and lambs are close folded, and have no more food than they clear off, —fold moved twice a day—one 75 feet iron hurdle on wheels to every five sheep. Lambs have the first bite, and are followed by the ewes to clear it all up. Our green food (tares, clover or Italian rye grass) after passing through the chaff cutter, is spread thinly over an asphalted floor in the cool barn to prevent it heating. We must enlarge our stackyards, or so separate our stacks as to leave room for working the corn and hay elevators, worked by a pony, for in one case near me the farmer who brought one of these a found it almost useless to him because his stacks were placed close toeach other in the stackyards, the pasture makes a good stackyard as far as room is concerned. The horse worked elevators that carry up the sheaves or hay, and drop them in the centre or any other part of the .slack, save the labor of quite three men, which is very important at bay time or harvest. Is not mildew often caused by too thick sowing and early laid crops ? I believe that this is one of the true causes. See what takes place. The densely packed mass of plants, weak below tumbles down, flat or twisted in various directions by winds and thunderstorms, and thatches the earth; so that, while rain can pass through the thatch, the wet earth is shaded from the action of the sum and air, and becomes in the like condition to a dark and damp cellar, where, we all know, mildew and fungi flourish. I have a dark corner in a portion of my house here, where my boots and shoes always mildew, if left long expossed to light. When crops stand erect, as nearly all mine do this year and generally, there is free circulation of air and light, and a free evaporation of moisture from the earth. Therefore, although from the intensely green luxuriance of the corn crops, mildew is often predicted by my visitors, it never comes. Of course, the drainage of land has a good deal to do with this, and so has the absence of trees and fences, but, wherever there is a dense closing in of the moist earth, either by too dense, flaggy, vertical, or laid crops, there we have risk of mildew, especially on rich boggy lands that force a great or rank development of flag from their cereals. My wheat crops from a bushel per acre, drilled, ai’e all I can desire, and even the 2 pecks per acre are undistinguisliable from the rest of the field. Barley 6 pecks oats 2 bushels, are enough for mo. J. J. MECHr.

MISCELLANEOUS. Rotation of crops may not positively enrich a farm, but it will at least retard and postpone its impoverishment. He who grows wheat after wheat, corn after corn for twenty or thirty years will need to emigrate before that term is fulfiled. The same farm wiil not support or endure him longer than that. All principal wheat-growing localities of twenty years ago are wheat-growing no longer; while England grows, larger crops thereof on the very fields that fed the armies of Saxon Harold and William the Couquerer. Rotation and manure have preserved these, as the lack of it ruined those. Only good farming pays. He who sows or plants without reasonable assurance of good crops in the majority of seasons might earn better wages of some capable neighbor than work for so poor a paymaster as he is certain to prove himself. It is far easier to maintain the productive capacity of a farm than to restore it. To exhaust its fertility, and then attempt its restoration by buying costly commercial fertilisers, is wasteful and irrational.

Some farmers who toil constantly from daybreak to dark yet die poor, because, through ignorance, they worked to disadvantage. If every farmer would devote an hour or two each day to reading and reflection, there would be fewer failures in farming than there are.

The best investment a farmer can make for bis children is that which surrounds their youth with the rational delights of an attractive home. The dwelling may be small and rude, yet a few flowers will embellish, as choice fruit trees will enrich and gladden it; while grass and shade are within the reach of the humblest. Hardly any labor done on a farm so profitable as that which makes the wife and children fond and proud of their home. Cooling down milk, and thereby abstracting the animal heat before starting it on the journey to town, has hitherto received little if any attention at the hands of dairymen in this colony. This cooling down process, however, is nevertheless a most important one, not only as regards keeping the milk sweet for a longer period of time than it otherwise would, but also as regards its wholesome and nutritious qualities. The “ Milk Journal,” recently commenting on the quality of milk, states that its density or specific gravity is not, as is commonly understood, a safe criterion of the goodness of milk, for when kept two or three days it often becomes actually lighter than water. This curious fact is somewhat difficult of credence, since milk contains about 10 per cent of solid matter. If correct, the great diminution in specific gravity can only be accounted for by some molecular changes taken place in the milk, and perhaps by the evolution of gases. Some similar change in density also occurres when milk is shaken by transport, and it become an important sanitary question, whether milk which has undergone such changes is safe food for man or animal. For young or delicate babies, stale milk, or even milk, which has been transported a distance of several miles, is often found to be injurious, producing readily acidity, and proving otherwise difficult of digestion. The shaking of any considerable journey appears so to change the relation of the constituents of the milk to each other, that the curd does not afterwards properly separate from the whey, nor does the cream rise to the surface. These chances are delayed when the milk, as is common in America, is rapidly cooled down as soon as it is drawn from the cow, before despatching it to the cheese and butter factories, or on longer journeys by rail to cities for consumption. If only on the score of keeping the milk sweet for a long time, extracting the animal heat from it as quickly as possible after milking should be carefully attended to. This is done by pouring the milk as soon as it is drawn from the cow into shallow troughs surrounded by coid water, and reducing the temperature of the milk to 60 degrees before it is put in the cans and started off to town. The summer with its heat is advancing, and therefore on both economical and sanitary grounds we commend the cooling of milk to those dairymen who supply the cities with this essential article of human food.

We give the following from the “ Sydney Mail” in reference to a-shipment of butter, to Ceylon :—“ A ton of Ulladulla butter, prepared by a firm in George-street for the P. and O. Company, is to be seen at the rooms of the Agricultural Society. It is remarkable for having been to Galle and back, and for having consequently, been meltod and yet not destroyed. It was purchased at Is 2d per lb, prepared tinned and put on board the mail steamer Avoca at Is 5d per lb. The common price of butter in Indian and Chinese ports ie 2s 6d and upwards. It strikes us that this would prove a far better market for butter than England. The material used iu the preparations are, to every hundredweight ol butter, 10 lb of dairy salt, 8 oz saltpetre, and lb of powdered loaf sugar. The, butter is tinned in 6 lb tins, and packed in cases among sawdust. The taste of the specimen in question is very good.” With the prices given above as those ruling in Indian and Chinese ports, it would surely pay to exercise every care in getting up an article in such form and so packed as to stand the voyage, and command a price that would leave a handsome profit to the shipper. The above lot was packed in sawdust, but unless the tins containing butter were soldered down, sawdust is not a suitable article for the purpose. A short time ago we saw a small trial lot of butter made up for Ceylon. It was rolled up in calico that had been previously steeped in brine, and placed in two-pound tins, surrounded by a layer of salt between the butter and the tin. The tins* were all afterwards packed in salt. We look forward with some interest for an account of the condition it may arrive. Earthenware or glass jars we think would be preferable to tin, but are much more expensive.