Staunton vindicator. [volume] (Staunton, Va.) 1860-1896, 1889-11-15
CONFLICTING ADVICE.

Burdette Reads Up Farming and
Chicken Raising and Gets All Mixed Up.
Talk about discussions in religion, about
warning creeds and battling churches, if you
want to get knee deep in a swamp Of conflict
ing views and opinions, wade through file
of agricultural papers. Now, there's nothing
vague, intangible, invisible and abstract in
agriculture. The ground is real and the
crops are sometimes real in the case of an
amateur gardener who moves out of town
because he can save years rent on June
peas grant you there is degree of abstrac-
ton that makes the science of aerated meta
physics solid as football match. But ir
the soft and thawins, weeks of spring a loas
farm in clay country is about as real a.
they make 'em
But now, read in my favorite agricultural
paper the other day that man who chad
patch clay over rock basted it heavily with
coal ashes" and myi Talk about richnessi
And cropsl Such melonsl And peas! And
such cornl Don't talk. I went straight
away to the kitchen and gave orders that
every handful of coal ashes was to be placed
in fruit jars and kept in the refrigerator
until such time as I could have it applied to
the garden. No matter what price the
neighbors might offer for it, not an ounce Of
it was to be sold.
Then I went back to the desk and turned
over to the next page of the paper, and a
farmer and market gardener in Hennessy
county said that a mixture of pounded glass,
rock salt, alkali and birthstone poured on red
hot, was far preferable, as fertilizer, to coal
ashes. He said he had killed every tree in a
healthy orchard, and made the fairest kitchen
garden in the Pomona valley bowling waste
by light applications Of coal ashes. My blood
ran cold as fastened out once more to noti-
fly the seneschal that if found one flake of
coal ashes about the castle within fifteen
minutes from the ukase (oo-kaz) would hang
q few traitors, more or less, from the fourth
story hook in the MARITIME tower.
Then | went back and read that any man
who kept hens and wanted eggs must be pre-
pared to spend most of his income on corn,
but it would be the best investment he ever
made Nothing like corn, not cracked, but fed
in whole grains, for making hens lay; it made
them lay seven times week when nothing
else would. and in fact it was the only thing
that would make hens lay all the year round.
Straightway ordered a carload of corn to
be purchased for the cackling denizens of
Crocus Hall, but before the messenger had set
forth to corner the corn market read from
another expert that Trough on Rats was
much better for hens than corn, inasmuch as
it killed them at once, thereby saving great
expense of keeping and was quite as produc-
tive when viewed as an egg plant. He closed
a narrative of his experience with corn by
piously hoping that the man who first sug-
gested the. destruction of all the poultry in
America by the use of corn as a food might
never, in this world or the next, be permitted
tDo oto Of f,-ko
nog, OF anything else in which the hen ore her
product entered as a component part. He
said you must feed little else but than pound
ed bone.
While 1 was wondering whose bones |
would like to pound my eye fell upon the tes-
timonial of one of the leading poulterers in
New York state, who said that he had lost
about ninety-eight of the finest hens that
ever acted the fool in their sanest moments,
by the ignorance or malice of a hired man,
who had mixed spoonful of pounded bone
in their feed one Sunday morning, while he,
the owner, was at church. He said that when
be came home and found what had been done
he chased the soulless imbecile clear across
the township with neck yoke, and if he'd
caught him he'd kicked him to death with
hay tedder.
So let up on the corner and the market
broke all to pieces. I am now feeding my
hens on anything they like, same as I have
been doing all summer. They wander around
the place and make their own selection, and
if there is anything that particularly don't
want them to have, they use it for dessert.
However, there are just two things in ag and
poultri culture would like to know: What
is good to put on land, and what is the best
kind of feed to scatter about your estate to
make your hens lay and poison your neigh
bor's.-Burdette in Brooklyn Eagle.