NOTES ON RURAL TOPICS.

Otago Witness, Volume 01, Issue 2123, 1 November 1894, Page 7

NOTES ON RURAL TOPICS.

How to relieve the congested state of the towns is one of the problems To the that calls for the earnest Country. attention of oar politicians.

; Battle the people on the land, is the Hon. John M'KenzU's panacea for the relief of the towns ; bat indiscriminate settlement on the land will not be altogether an unmixed blessing. Without doubt, the man and who can sit down beneath his own vine and fig tree, figuratively speaking, ought to be a happier man than he who is by the dire force of circumstances compelled to live in some small tenement in a orowded back alley. , The freedom of a country life, with, the broad expanse of fresh air, is in marked contrast to the close stuffiness of the average city life ; and the healthful surroundings for the children is paradise contrasted with the street gutter whose filth the average child delights to revel in. The country life is a joyful one •entrusted with the life of the poor in the city, and the attraction is so fascinating that most people who live in the orowded lanes long to flee to the country. Bat many of the poor unfortunates who have eought the country only find that the straggle for existence i»even more hopeless, there. The life of a village settler in a bush selection it not always s particularly happy one. Some I know, who planted their taomeß in- a virgin forest, having to clear a patch to build their hoaffe, have had a hard straggle for existence. The work of clearing off the forejt, in the first place, is laborious, and it is at least a couple of years before anything oan be grown. Daring these two years the settler has to live, and probably has a wife and children to maintain at the same time. If ordinary labour were plentiful he might earn enough outside.to keep the pot boiling while gradually clearing his allotment ; but as these settlements are generally far away from work, the task of , the settler is doubly difficult. If he has to go right away from home for work there is a poor chance of his keeping himself away from home, hia family at home, and olearing . his allotment at the fame time. The only

hope for the bush settler lies in the Govern* ment providing work at his door, and this can only be done where a large block of new countiy is opened for settlement. And even then the Government find that they have to sbafO'the road work with the unemployed, whose- families dwell in the towns. The inteation to settle the people on the land is a very good one, no doubt, but the method of its accomplishment is not an easy problem to solve. Only a small proportion of the community are fitted by nature to earn their living off the soil, for agriculture requires more skill than is generally considered necessary. Land is absolutely useless to a good many of the village settlers, who are only holding allotments uncultivated that might in other hands support a family.

The season for turnip-sowiog is again upon

us, and should the weather Tnrnip. continue as dry as it has been sowing-. during the past few weeks, some difficulty will be ex- i perlenced in getting the seed to take. If a first sowing fails it is veiy disappointing, and if the ground has to be worked over a second time, the crops may be too late. It is always advisable to defer the work of sowing turnips till a favourable chance is secured, as the after life of tha plants depends very largely upon the first start made. Turnips sown any time before New Year under favourable circumstances will be in use quite as early as those sown in November which get stunted at the outset, and the later-sown crop will give the best yield if their-early growth Is vigorous. If the soil Is moist when the seeds are first covered in it is marvellous what an amount of dry weather turnips oaa witbetaud. As far as the season has gone it gives promise of a dry, hot summer, so that more than ordinary care will have to bo exercised in tbe matter cf sowing turnip seed. If the dry weather holds throughout the turnip-sowing season, it is a good plan to prepare only a few drills at a time, and then to sow these before the soil becomes dry. For the small farmer a very good plan is to drill up a few drills in the afternoon and sow these the last thing before leaving off work. The seed will then get the benefit of the cool, moist earth over night, and have a far better ohance of germinating. But there is nothing like sowing the first oppor^ tunity after rain when, the soil is in good pondltion to «ow this somewhat delicate seed. As to i&A&ute, ft certain, proportion ox epiable tiboppuite ifl jja£i»pensa_b.le to Rl?&

The late hot weather has made the yolk rise in the fleeces, whioh will not, Handlisg therefore, oat so dry and light the as was the case last year Wool. when there so much rain as

to wash the wool clean, but not enough heat to promote the generation of a desirable amount of grease. In a hot and dry season, such as this promises to be, the sheep thrive mush better without their coats, and therefore, unless the weather obanges very much before this gets into print, the sooner the shearing is done the better after the first week In November. It is not, however, with the shearing that I have to do at present, but rather with the handling of the wool in the fleeoe. Anyone attending a looal auction of farmers' clips cannot fall to obssrve the very slovanly and careless manner in whioh many of the small lots ara sent to market, and farmers who are competent and careful in other respects seem to be quite Ignorant or quite indifferent as to the get-up of their few bales of wool each year. We know that It is not advisable to market grain without soreenlng out the tail corn or the potatoes without sorting out the small ones, or grass seed without removing weeds and rubbish, and yet the fleeces are bundled together and packed away just as they come off the sheep, with skirtings, looks, dags, &o. all rolled together. I do not mean to say that this U the general method, and I am only writing for the benefit of those who are so negligent of their own interests as to devote so little care to their wool dip. Farmers need not pietend to go ia for any elaborate sorting and classing, bat they oan at least separate the clean from the dirty, the orossbred from the merino, and let each bale be precisely what itpurports to be instead of marking it as fleece wool and putting in dirt and dags as well. Bayers will not buy rubbish at wool prices, and therefore the. good wool suffers in price because of the other substances that are packed up with it. It Bhould be unnecessary to tell any sensible man such Belf-evident facts, and yet one cannot doubt the evidence of one's own Bight whtn seeing some of the bales opened for sampling.

In this connection I should like to refer to the presence of pieces of Straw in straw, chaff, &0., that often the Wool, appear in the sheep's backs before shearing. Straw stacks are excellent things for shelter in winter time, but the shesp should not be allowed acc«es to them during the last few months before shearing time. They rub around the stackgand get their fleeces full of strawand chaff, andthat deteriorates the value of the wool very much, as [such things are found very difficult to remove from the wool by the manufacturers. Buoh fleece* rank in value with sandy fleeces, and that means that it would ba better to burn the straw stacks after winter, or take some steps to keep tbe sheep away from them. It is by want of thought and neglect of these apparently trifling matters that farmers throw away a good many pounds sterling annually, and I need not add that so long as a pound, means 20s farmers should look well after the details of all farm management.

Mr Gladstone has always been a keen advocate of what the French call Small U petite cultwe, which means Culture. the culture of the various small and seemingly unimportant products of the farm. Fruit, vegetables, poultry, honey, &o. are, I suppose, what are meant by the term small culture. Many years ago I remember seeing a report in the Home papers of a speech of Mr Gladstone's in which he pointed ont to his tenants the advantage of paying attention to the small things of tbe farm as well as the larger sources of Income. Recently he again referred to the subject when addressing a large agricultural assembly at a flower show near his place of Hawarden. He expressed himself exceedingly well, and referred to the gains to be made by means of these minor matters in such a nioe, plausible manner that after reading his speech one oonld scarcely avoid agreeing with everything the hon. gentleman said, but I'm afraid the successful adoption of his well-meant advice is not so easy as the talking about it. On small holdings in tbe vicinity of large towns there are various ways of turning an honeßt penny oat of the soil, and many small matters oan be attended to with profit; and as many a miokle makes a muckle, the little things are not to be despised. This is one of the theories, however, which can only be reduced to praotice under suitable circumttances and suitable surroundings. A profitable market within easy reaoh ifl the fifth and moat imqortaft jMrtderfttaßU |»1

given that the rest remains with the farmer* But it stands to reason that the far-back settler oannot compete in these things with the grower near at hand to the market, and, therefore, it is of no ase to devote one's attention to the production of anything which is heavily handicapped by carriage to market. Nevertheless, there are probably many ways of supplementing the small farmer's income which are at present neglected, and which are not prohibited by distanoe from any large town, and in such times as the present no farmer, be he large or small, can afford to ignore and negleot any means of increasing the yearr/ returns. The latest thing is the growth of sunflower seed, and as there is a certain market offered for the seed we might do worse than give it a fair trial. AGBIOOLA.