GLEANINGS.

Otago Witness, Issue 1653, 28 July 1883, Page 7

GLEANINGS.

"hard should have the whole —A bo&rlpg o**~. -«,tment is to sow clover ground. The Dew **«»». •■• and pasture the pigs" tip"oß it, • sawdust, for —A dry substance like wool Gt - •^ eggs hens' nests abstracts moistdre; from w. 'f, and ruins them. The hen, if left to ™™£; will make her nest on the moist earth.— mittot and Farmer. , T , , „ M —At the bottom of the nesting boxes place 1 ft damp sod of earth and mould! it into a! concave form. This dampness is beneficial, asit supplies the moisture the eggs lose duriflg the process of hatching.— Poultry Monthly. _ —In Scotland the shorthorn bull lfl being used with Ayrshire cowa to 1 produce dairy animals, and the result is said to be very encouraging. The flow of milk 18 not' lessened, while the calves are of much better quality, and bring more from the butcher. —The practice of running hay through a hay-cutter and reducing it to as short pieces as possible, and then mixing with corn and sending it to an ordinary grist-mill to be ground into provender for poultry, has been followed for several years by certain breeders with good results. — Poultry Yard. — Stump3.— By all odds the cheapest and best way to eradicate the common hardwood stumpa, says the Practical Farmer, is to work the ground with a snovel plough, sow buckwheat, or plant corn until seeded to timothy, orchard grass, and clover, and pasture until the stumps so far decay that they can be pulled out by hitching a chain around the top when the ground is wet in the winter or spring. —Ewes. — Nursing ewes should be supplied with nutritious food suited to the breed. Merinos may have corn given them without injury. Heavier bodied sheep will do better on mixed food. A good feed is made of corn and oats or rye and bran, in equal quantities, ground together and mixed with half the quantity of linseed oil meal. One pound of this a day, with a few cut roots or potatoes, will help both mother and lamb. —Sore Shoulders. — Very few horses would have sore shoulders if owners or their men would spend, say, tan minutes a week in scraping off the dirt from the collars which has accumulated by perspiration. After thoroughly scraping take some blunt instrument and beat the collar for a minute or two, which will make it as soft as when new. We have often seen this done to great advantage. Saddles may be treated in the same manner.

- Professor Jensen, of the School of Agriculture at Copenhagen, Sweden, has made the important discovery that the spores which cause the potato blight are vvashed down to the tubers by the rains, and that infection can be prevented by suitable manipulation at what is called the "second or summer earthing," by which is probably meant hoeing and hilling up, provided this is done in dry weather. The blight or rot is credited with a damage to the Irish crop in 1882 of £4,317,667. — There still remains a deal of land upon the vast continent of America that can be put under wheat crops, but at the rate afc which it is being taken up and exhausted it will not be many years ere the farmers will be driven to use the same methods for conserving the fertility of their soil that have been adopted from time immemorial in countries that are older in civilization, and then the true farmer will be able to compete advantageously against those who treat the soil in a slovenly manner. —Green crop manuring is everywhere available, and its benefits are widely appreciated, particularly on light and sandy soils. Soils of this nature are extremely porous, and many of the most valued fertilisers are washed out of them with every heavy rain that falls ; -on this account bulky manures of any kind, such as long farmyard or stable manure, or green crop manuring, are found to be much more serviceable and economical in application, and if other manures are used they should only be applied in small quantities aB a top-dressing before rain, when the crops are in active growth and can at once appropriate the food therein contained.

— Polled Cattle. — After the recent reports of the horrible result of the transit of horned cattle upon one of the New South Wales lines of railway, it really seems advisable and desirable that polled cattle should be encouraged as much as possible. It certainly would appear strange to us at first to see polled shorthorns and Herefords, but we daresay in time we should get used to it. The operation seems simple. A correspondent in an English paper says : — " When a calf is old enough for the horn to start, a very small protuberance is felt upon the bones of the head. Take a knife and cut a small cross over this little horn, and lift out the incipient horn, press the edges of the wound together, and put an adhesive strap over it, and there is no more trouble, and you have hornless or polled cattle."