FARM & GARDEN NOTES.

Waikato Argus, Volume V, Issue 309, 2 July 1898, Page 2 (Supplement)

FARM & GARDEN NOTES.

FARMING- NOTES. The weather has been very changeable dining the past week, with numerous showers, but with an absence of cold winds, that is greatly appreciate I by firm stock, the temperature being higher than for some time past. Growth in crass, and late sown turnips has been good, young grass especially, showing a good recovery from the injurious effects ot the late severe frosts. At this time of the year the importance of having land throughly drained by pipes or underoluuuiels, is strikingly illustrated. Wherever anything like undue soakagc exists, caused by insuffi ■ cicnt outlets for the stagnant water, the best of land will become dormant, as far as growth of vegetation is concerned ; while upon adjoining plots that are either naturally as by artificial means, fully drained, a vigorous growth, will be shown. Instances can bo adduced when this want of drainage is exhibited, oven on hill-sides and high-lyinn lands, which by their figuration, should have a perfect drainage naturally. In short, it may be taken as a rulo, that whenever the subsoil is shown to be impervious to the passage of surface water, assistance in the way of under-draining should be given. The markets for the majority of (arm products, including beef and mutton, have witnessed a decline within the past few days, but this is thought to be only temporary. In cereals and potatoes the length of time which must elapse before the next season's crop can be put on the market is regarded as an important element of strength in the position ; while beef and mutton should continue at remunerative rates for some weeks to come. Store stock of all classes suitable for fattening during the present turnip season are in good demand at rates which will necessitate a continuance of full prices for fat stock, if purchases are to prove remunerative. The weak point in the position of our graziers is the uncertainty which characterises values in the Auckland market. With an absence of an outside demand, such as would exist if freezing for export were vigorously carried on and which would tend to steady values of stock, the tone of the market depends, week to week, upon the lo:al supply and demand, a few extra bullocks or trucks of sheep causing a drop in prices quite out of reason to the circumstances : while, on the other hand, bud Weather on the coast or a temporary scarcity of supplier, will send prices up just as readily—a state of affairs which is anomalous in a large metropolis and shipping port such as Auckland, and works to the detriment of our agricultural and pastoral interests.

Pigs,—Farmers in Feilding district find that rearing pigs pays. One settler made £4O last year, and he said, "Thoro was no trouble, and I wondered where the money came from." The experience of many other dairy farmers has been the same.

A Goou Return.—The " Marlborough Times " has heard a very good instame of the present value of agricultural land in the district. A young man rented a section of six or seven acres, paying £l2 for it for one year, and obtained from it a crop of potatoes which returned him after paying all expenses as much as £IBO.

Frozen Meat in thk Argentine.— With regard to tho prospects of the frozen meat trade, it is said iu London that the New Zealand Shipping company are goiug to start a " frigorifico" at Bahia Blanca, a port of the Argentine Republic, and to call there regularly for live stock and frozen meat. The possibilities of the port are described as verv great. t t t

Good Potatoes Yields.—There have says the Lyttelton Times, been very good yields of potatoes this season. Mr Joseph Taylor, from six aud a half acres of land at Papapui, has dug nearly 1,200 sacks of Derwents, giving a yield of nearly 20 tons to the acre. A resident at tho St. Albans district off half an acre, which was sown with kidooys, has netted no loss than £55 after uaying expenses. t X t

Aoe ok Sheep.—Owing to the difficulty sometimes experienced of tolling tho age of a sheep by its mouth, particularly in a gravally, hard-soil country and in a time of drought, Messrs Smith, Elder and Co., of Adelaide, state that they intend in future to describe tho age of all stud sheep they sell by years, and not by mouths. They have communicated with the leading stuck agents in all the colonies on this subject, and, it is said, from the replies received there is every probability the principle will be gonerally adopted. t t t

A Standard Cow.—An American paper says : Applying the • very reasonable rule tha<; a successful dairy-man laid down at a recent institute, that a standard cows should produce 50001 b of milk and 2601 b of butter, or GOOlb of cheeßO in a year, it would seem that a good many more cows ought to go to the butcher. It is well to remember that not more than half the calfs arc heifers, and not more than half of these are just the typo from which you wish to build up your herd, a certain per cent, of thess may havo something happen to them beforomaturity. And then a cow is not at her best till fresh the third time. It has been proved at experiment stations that a heifer is only a third of a cow, the second time fresh twothirds of a cow, and the third time froah as good as she ever will be. t x t

Minor Fertilisers.—There are many fertilising substances about the farm that may be made use of, but which are rarely looked after. Theso include leaf mould, ffarbajjro, dead animals, house waste, &c. The-io" should all bo saved and applied where'they will do the most good. They will always repay tho labour required. Whole bones contain many valuable fertilisers, chiefly phosphoric acid, but it is sorao trouble to reduce them so as to make this available for plant food. Bury the bones about the roots of vines and trees, aad you will thus utilise them freely without any labour. Some •of the richest farms in England are those upon which the liquid manures are saved and applied regularly to the meadows. Cisterns and distributing pipes aro the means employed. No other known method of manuring will make so rich a growth of grass.

Pasteurised Milk.—Commenting on the evident favour with which pasteurised milk is being I'ecsived by the general public, a contributor to u Southern contemporary says, in regard to the need for milk being .subjected to the treatment, the purer the air aud the cleaner the conditions under which a cow is milked the fewer bacteria will get into the milk. Tho following experiment, made by Hoxhlct, .shows that this has an important bearing in practice. A cow, kept in a dirty cowshed, was milkad without having her udder previously cleaned. The milk, kept at a temperature of GO deg Fahr., coagulate!, as a result of the action of microbes, in 30 hours. The milk of the same cow drawn nuder better conditions—viz., in tho fresh air of an orchard, and after the cow's udder and the hands of tho milker had been washed —did not coagulate, though kept at tho same temperature, until, after a lapse of 88 hours. The lesson taught by this experiment is that everything connected with tho operation of milking should bo scrupulously clean. Unfortunately milking is too often carried out without sufficient: cleanliness, and it is to remove tho injurious effects caused by bacteria introduced through dirty and careless handling that milk requires to bo i pasteurised.

Rearing Motherless Lamiis.—A correspondent of Tho Field writes that a farmer at West Haddon tried the experiment this season of rearing a motherle'B lamb by means of a quiet cow. The cow raising no objection as i* usually tho case when approached in this way, th,-> lamb instinctively began sucking, and soon seemed to be as mush at home as it would with iis own mother. After tho first others were put with tho cow, until there wero six in all, but this number was found to be too many and they wore reduced to four. In the following" issue of the same paper another correspondent wrote to say that the experiment was not a new departure. " Over fifty years ago it was quite commonly done by my mother, and continued by myself during the time I farmed. One .small Irish cow, I remember, reared several lambs. One year she had four, which, when they were first. put to her, could not reach her teats, and had to be hell up to them; but being allowed to accompany the cow in the pasture they very soon found out how to surmount that difficulty. Two put their raised knee!* against the inside of the cow's hind legs, and thus reached the hind tsats, and tho other two placed their knees on the backs of the others, and got to the front teats. Ouo season the same cow reared a calf and two lambs at Che same time, and male thorn good ones.' t t i Washing and Working Butter.— With regard to washing the butter, the water should be irreproachably pure, should never be allowed to lie in the tanks overnight, and should be 2deg. or 3deg. colder than the butter ; if the water was warmer the butter was rendored .sticky, and if it was too cold the butter became hard and brittieand difficult to work. Tho object of washing butter was to remove the butter-milk, but as it also removed the aroma which it was desirable to preserve, they should strive to minimise the washing, and the best way to do that was to churn at a low temperature. In salting butter they should use only the best salt, and they should vary the amount of salt in accordance with the amount of mohture in the butter—the finer the granulation the more moisture would the butter retuin. In making butter the main thing was to avoid friction or smearing. Some colonial butter-makers simply spoiled every pound of butter workod by them because they rubbed and did not press tho butter. At the first working tho aim should bo solely to mix the salt evenly and make tho butter cohesive. The aim of the second working was to expel the moisture, and tins f-hould be undertaken as soon as the salt had had time to dissolve thoroughly and tho butter to regain its firmness With refrigeration this could be accomplished in two or three hours, but with out it it was best to leave the butter over night and re-work it first thing in tho morning before it cot warm. t "" { I" Preservation of Farmyard Manures. —The chemist to the Canadian Agricultural Department has recently completed an experiment in the preservation of farmyard manure which is of interest to farmers. A lot of manure, composed of equal quantities of horse and cow manure was kept in a partially closed shed for a year. In the first instance it weighed 80001 b, and at tho end of the year enly 26591 b. The reduced bulk was much richer in tho elements of fertility than tho fresh manure, as it well might bo considering there was a loss of two-thirds of the original bulk. But although the percentages of nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash were greater in tho rotten than in tho fresh manure, the total quantities were much less. The 80001 b of fresh manure contained 41'Glb of nitrogen. 24'81b of phosphoric acid, and 60'Slb of potash ; whereas the 20591 b of rotten manure a year latter contained only 23-Glb of nitrogen, 19'51b of phosphoric acid, and 39 81b of potash. The above figures give some idea of the loss incurred when farmers keep manuro in dunghills in the open for a long time, where naturally the loss is much more rapid. Many skilled farmers are fully awaro of this, and as a preventive, in making up tho heaps, place alternate layers of dried earth with tho fresh-made dung. These layers of earth absorb the fertilising elements evolved by the fermentation of the dung, and which otherwise might be lost through evaporation or washed out by rainfall. Others again cart out and plough in the manure as it is made in the farmyard, and seed immediately, so that tho rootlets of the growing crop-may absorb the plant-food developed during the decomposition of the dung, t J t To Get Rid of Soruel.—Sorrel is one of the most difficult weeds to get rid of once it gets fairly established, and in reply to an enquiry as to the best practico for its elimination it can be stated, says the Leader, as one of the positive facts that it is labour in vain to attempt to get rid of sorrel in rainy or even coal weather. The work must be done when tho sun's rays are sufficiently powerful to wither the plant when it is turned up, and by keeping this fact steadily in view many farmers in tho Western district have been able to eradicate the past. _ In working the land they find the best thing to use is a " skimmer," an implement invented by the onion growers of Portarlington, and ÜBed by them as the best means of cultivating the soil for the onion crop. By carefully walchiug a field, and working only on hot days, each successive growth of sorrel is killed as it appears, and paddocks that were formerly overrun with the weed are now free from it. If the soil is moist and cool the sorrel will sprout with undiminished vigor, but the combined efiorts of heat and tho skimmer are too much for it, the result being shown in clean fields. As tho namo indicates, thr skimmer is an implement designed for operating on the surface soil only, though it can bo sot to stir the ground to a depth of 3 or 4 inches. It consists of a rectangular iron framo, to which are attached two steel knives, each about 2|- feet in length, and set so as to form two sides of a triangle. The depth of working is regulated by a wheel, and handles at the end arc used for guiding tho implement. Onion growers use it because it provides a firm seed bed for onions, preventing the bulbs from growing downwards in tho toil, a point of great importance in onion cultivation. In recommending tho I'ortarlington skimmer, the idea is to explain what is wanted, but any implement that can be adapted to the same work will do. THE ABORTION BACILLUS. Veterinary science is making great strides in this country and on tho Continent. Too latest discovery of importance is the segregation of the abortion bacillus, which Professor Bang has accomplished. He has succeeded in cirrying to a issue the valuable suggestive work of the French veterinarian" M. Nocard. The Journal of Comparative Pathology and Therapeutics describes several interesting facts about this bacillus. It appears that it thrives in either too much or too littlo oxygen, but in any condition between these two it will not dovolop. Experiments "appear to show beyond any doubt that lor tho abortion bacillus in its behaviour towards oxygen tnere are two optima—-namely, first, a degree of oxygen tension in the nutritive medium less than that of the atmospheric air ; and second, the presence iu the nutritive medium of a very oxygen tension, which, hou ever lies some what under 109 per cent. Between these two there is an intermediate zone, iu which the abortion bacillus grows badly or not at all." Tho above question is strung at a rather high pitch to be intelligently followed by the average reader, but its substance is simply explained in the seutenee proceeding. Tho experiments made prove tho great vitality of the abortion bacillus. A cow which has once aborted is liable to do so again unless the uterus is carefully disinfected, There is also the

difficulty of getting rid of the disease from an infected building by reason of the fact that bacillus is extremely tena3 cious of life. Epizotic abortion among sheep is little understood. It i* generally considered that sheep are less liable to abort than cows, but recent experience seems to disprove this theory. Sheep have been known to abort where epizotic abortion has prevailed among cows. It may be communicated by the germ to the theep, mares, cows, and probably goats. It is, '•therefore of the utmost importance to keep all femaio breeding stock from an infected building. Regarding the fact that abortion may disappear from a herd where fresh animals are not continually brought in, it is pointed out that this mav possibly accrue from the fact that the animals become immune from the disease in time. The byre should bo very carefully disinfected, powdered lime being very freely used. This will not impart any disagreeable odour to the milk. Inasmuch as epizotic abortion belongs to the group of diseases which loavo behind them at least a relative immunity, the possibility of conferring such immunity by propuy* luetic injecti'n-i of a vaicineor of an abortion serum naturally suggests itself. If, howe/er, it should turn out that nothing can be douc in this direction, it will still be possible to combat the plague of abortion by the circumspect exorcise of isolation and disinfection. The discovery is of vast importance, says The Farmer and Stockbreeder, and has prepared the way for a rational system of treatment.