NEWS AND NOTES.

Northern Advocate, 6 October 1913, Page 2

NEWS AND NOTES.

Change your poultry run once or twice a year, if you have sufficient ground to do so. Dig up and plant the old runs with greenstuff—peas or beans. This will sweeten the ground and improve the health of the fowls. Drainage is a necessity for the 'location of a chickenhouse. Young fowls cannot stand wet, damp houses. Canadian poultrymen have been using electricity instead of gas for the incubator. The former gives the steadier heat. You may tell fresh eggs in this way. Place in a. basin of cod water. If the egg sinks to the bottom and stays there, it is fresh. If it floats off the bottom at all, the freshness is doubtful; and if it floats on the surface the egg is quite bad. Do not let any surplus males eat up the profit. Keep enough for breeding uses, get them into condition for the market. Let your motto be this year: "Fewer birds, better quality." Nothing but the best will do nowadays. A poor class bird eats as much as, if not more than, a firstclass hen, and is as much trouble to look after, and produces 50 per cent, fewer eggs, generally speaking. If you keep fowls, why not keep good ones ? The fowls in the ordinary backyard are frequently too fat. They get all the house scraps, bran and pollard, and wheat —too much food: in fact —and are confined in a small space, with no opportunity for exercise. No matter how well ventilated a icoop may be, it is impossible for the air to be pure and healthful unless the inside of the coop is kept perfectly clean. The nearer poultry are kept in a natural state the more hardy will they be. It was this fact that led up to the invention of the scratch-ing-shed house plan. The soil in the poultry yard is better to be of a porous nature, preferably of a sandy type. In locating the site for the poultry building it is well to select a spot where there will be a natural drainage away from the building. Chicken houses should be as well kept, relatively, as the home. Chickens thrive no better in filthy, unhealthful surroundings than do people, and filthy poultry houses breed disease and vermin. Dry feeding all the time makes a strong muscular bird, on the lean, tough side, and has many advocates. In bringing up chickens, dry feeding for the first month gives the best results as a rule. It is quick and clean—the latter is a big thing with young chickens. A poultry rearer at Domremy, Prance, has discovered that by mixing pepper with the food of fowls

their plumage turns pink, which changes to a vivid scarlet about an j hour before a coming thunderstorm, j