REPAIRS AND IMPROVEMENTS.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1095, 19 April 1883, Page 3

REPAIRS AND IMPROVEMENTS.

To keep a farm in repairs requires the careful attention of the owner from the very day it is put into use. Trees, etc ~ that are set for ornament or shade, improve from the hour they begin (0 grow ; but pretty much everything else upon the farm begins to show decay from the day when it is exposed to the sun and raiu. The best of faint parts with much of its lustre in a month, begins to fade in three, is quite dull in six months, and requires renewing in a year. New 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 tendency never diminishes. Hence, with these fads before him, it stands the fanner in hand to build with a view to the natural tendency in builings and pictures 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 • hence it is better to guard against the corner going down before the structure is placed upon it. The sagging gates or the untidy bars affect the appearance of all the immediate vicinity. 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 hinge post will absolutely insure against sagging. But a heavy stick, or three-inch plank, placed just beneath the surface, with an end against each post, will, as a rule, hold the hingepost perpendicular and the gate level* The impressions upon the mind 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 tracks—no regard being had to lines—are seen at disadvantage. Yet if fences are erect and straight, and afford a reasonably sure barrier against trespassing animals, the building kept in repair, and the immediate premises kept clear 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 received from any view will be favourable.

But perhaps the neglect to drain wet places upon the farm is as common a fault as any other, and one that shows the neatness in fields, and entails lessened profits with unvarying certainty. When the team can be driven, with a load, over ground hitherto too wet and soft fo bear an empty waggon, then it is evident that drainage has been made available. No land should be left about the corners or other paris of fields in such condition that water will stand long enough uwon it <0 prevent a good crop being grown thereon. As it has been proved possible to redeem impassable swamps, there can be no reasonable excuse for continuing to tolerate unsightly angular parcels of wet ground in enclosed fields, kept either for tillage or for grass.

It is snid that a man may generally be known by the company he keeps ; so the business character of the owner of the farm oo the right of the road, or that one on the left, may be pretty correctly estimated at a glance, even from the window of the car moving at high speed. The furrows being turned by the moving team, whether these are straight and deep

cr crooked and shallow, are fact* that, disconnected from all others, hare a pointed meaning.