Subscriber.
Field and Furrow.
One of the strong points in preparing horses for spring work is in having their shoulders in a good, sound condition. With this to start with and soft and well-fitting collars there need be but little fear of any difficulty in keeping them all right, no matter how hard the labor horses have to endure. By keeping the collars well cleared of any dirt which may accumulate upon them from the sweating of the horse, and by bathing them daily with cold water, there need be but little fear of bad shoulders.
Husbandman: Every member of the Elmira Farmers' Club present had used sapling clover, more or less, and all regarded it with favor, although for making hay common red clover is worth more, as it is also for pasture. Mr. Ward expressed the opinion, in which all shared, that there were really but two varieties of field clover in common use at the North, red clover, usually called medium, and the large, or sapling clover. The chief function of the clover root as a fertilizer is in bringing nitrogen from the lower soil upward within reach of succeeding crops and changing its form to meet the requirements of the plant and crops that follow.
Brow Chemical Co. Circular: The wise farmer will change his seed from year to year. A remarkable feature of the variety in potatoes is that no two kinds of potato are made up of the same chemical components in precisely the same proportion. There are now over 300 varieties of potatoes of greater or less merit. Some are celebrated for their large size, some for their fineness of texture and some for the great increase which may be expected from them. One hundred and thirteen years ago there were but two known varieties of potatoes, one being white, the other red. If the soil is too poor potatoes starve, if too wet they catch cold, and refuse to grow to perfection.
Farmer's Advocate: Spring operations will soon commence, and with these a demand for good farm hands. The general rule that is followed in this country is to put off the hiring of men to the last moment, and trust to chances for some one coming along, and then probably some inferior workman has to be taken, or none at all. Men who know their business on a farm will not wait, and are early picked up in the neighborhood in which they may reside. The trusting to men coming along just at the exact moment you are crowded, is a bad policy. There should always be profitable employment for a man in the early spring months before seeding commences, and it will pay any farmer to secure good farm hands early; and pay them good wages.
Peoria Transcript: We prepared a half acre of ground as good as we knew how. Upon one-half of this plat we planted one bushel of seed obtained from Michigan, and upon the other half of home-grown seed, both being of the variety known as Snowflake. The two lots of seed cut for planting were similar in appearance, both as regards size and quality. The whole lot received the same[g] treatment during the growing season. The plants made about the same growth on the two plats and suffered equally from bugs; but when it came to digging, those from new seed yielded two bushels of large potatoes for every one that could be secured on the land planted with seed of our own growing. This difference in yield could be accounted for on no other theory than the change in seed, as the quality of seed, soil, and culture were the same. This leads to the belief that simply procuring seed of favorite varieties from a distance would insure us good crops at much less expense than can be done experimenting with new, high-priced seeds.
In another column a Kansas correspondent speaks of the crab grass in an exceedingly favorable way. We find the following regarding this grass in a late New York Times: Every Northern farmer knows the common coarse grass called door-yard grass, which has long, broad leaves, a tough, bunchy root, and a three-fingered spreading head, which contains large, round seeds. It is known as Eleusine Indica, and grows luxuriously in open drains and moist places. It appears late in the summer. This is an extremely valuable grass in the South. A friend who went to Georgia soon after the war bought an abandoned plantation on account of the grass growing upon it. It was this door-yard grass. He pastured sheep upon it and cut some for hay. Northern baled hay was selling at $30 a ton at that time. He wrote asking me to[h] buy him two mowers and a baling press, and went to baling hay for the Southern market, selling his sheep and living an easy life except in haying time. His three hundred acres of cleared land has produced an average of 200 tons of hay every year which gives him about four times as much profit as an acre of cotton would do. Perhaps there may come an end to this business, and the grass will run out for want of fresh seed, but with a yearly dressing of Charleston phosphate the grass has kept up its original vigor. Now why could we not make some use of this grass, and of others, such as quack-grass, which defy so persistently all our efforts to destroy them?