[Field and Furrow.]
Secretary W. A. Armstrong reports that all the kinds of commercial fertilizers applied to the alluvial soils cultivated by members of the Elmira Club proved in every instance to be “practically worthless.” The best that can be said is that “some of them used on uplands in which clay is a constituent, have fair probability, at least, of yielding satisfactory returns.”
At the Mississippi Valley Cane-Growers’ meeting at St. Louis, delegates from Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Michigan gave their experiences in growing cane and making sirups. In Illinois, Kansas, and Nebraska good results were generally obtained, but the season was bad in other States and expectations were not realized. All concurred, however, in the belief that the cultivation of sorghum was a good thing, and would yield handsome profits.
The New York Tribune: The animated discussion of the subject at the recent meeting of the Connecticut Board was unfavorable to ensilage. Exhibition of a sample of clover put in a silo when wet called out the query whether it was fed to cows to make Limburger cheese. One reporter says it “fairly howled” through the City Hall, echoing and reverberating a fearful smell. President James A. Bell, of the State Agricultural Society, is quoted as declaring that the free talk of the occasion “will save the farmers thousands of dollars by keeping them out of the silo system.”
At which end should a hoe-handle be the larger? At which end should a pitch-fork be the larger? It is not every farmer that thinks of these things until his attention is called to them. As Mr. J. J. Thomas remarks, the laborer who makes with a common hoe 2,000 strokes every hour should not wield a needless ounce. If any part is heavier than needed even to the amount of half an ounce only, he must lift this needless half ounce 2,000 times every hour. A hoe-handle should be smallest near the hoe and largest near the other end; a pitch-fork handle the reverse. Oughtn’t it?
A member of the Oxford (Ohio) Farmers’ Club recently said: We know something how soil was made, if we do not know much. The soils in the forests and untilled lands are better than they were a century ago, or in the days of our fathers; but, alas, it is not so with the soils man has cultivated. He thinks the term “cultivating” means to improve, make better. We may make our soils better, but so few do that that we ought never to use the term “cultivating the soil.” We harass, and torture, and murder, and starve the soil. By withholding more than is meet we rob our best friend.
New York Times: Tobacco is a universal insecticide. It kills ticks upon sheep; the troublesome scab insect; its related species which produces mange and itch; lice, fleas, and all other insect parasites which infest and annoy animals; and root-lice, leaf-lice, and all other pests which injure plants. Just at this season an application of fine tobacco dust or snuff may be used effectively to relieve calves and fowls from the vermin which keeps them poor and wretched, and a decoction of tobacco, applied to house or greenhouse plants with a brush, will destroy the pestiferous green fly and all other insects which infest them. The same liquid may also be poured around the roots of house plants that are infested with the small white worms which are the larvæ of a small black fly that may be found in the pots and upon the soil in them.
The town of Amenia, in Dutchess county, N. Y., has tried, with marked success, the plan of keeping a force of four or five men at work on highways through most of the year under the supervision of an experienced and skillful builder of roads, who gives his attention constantly to the work. Every part of the seventy-five miles of highway in the town is in good condition, and the expense of keeping it so has been much less than it could have been by the old method. The new plan has greatly relieved the farmers, who have not been called to work on the roads at a time when other duties demanded their attention. New York has a law which directs that the voters of any town may elect to adopt this plan of hiring a force of men and a competent commissioner to make and keep in repair the roads of their town, but the plan, once adopted, must be followed for not less than three years. It has been found that by the method described the roads have been kept in better condition than ever before, and that the cost of the work has actually been less than that of road-making by the old way.
Correspondent Ohio Farmer: In 1882 I raised a piece of Hubbard squashes. The ground was manured very heavily with rich rotten compost, probably at the rate of fifty tons or more per acre. It is necessary to make the land very rich to succeed with this crop, but that isn’t the point I am after. That same land last year was planted with potatoes, and it was there that they rolled out so large and numerous as to yield at the rate of 500 bushels per acre. Just over the fence, on a part of another lot, where no manure had been applied for many years, there were only 200 bushels per acre. Difference in soil and kinds of potatoes might account for some of this great variation in yield, but I think it fair to say that 200 bushels per acre of the best yield was owing to the manure put on the ground for squashes the previous year. The potatoes were none of them sold for less than forty cents a bushel, so we have at least $80 per acre cash benefit from that heavy manuring the second year, to say nothing of $240 an acre which the squashes brought. It was, of course, a little more trouble to pick up and market the larger crop, but enough of the potatoes were sold for over forty cents per bushel to pay for that.