St. Johnsbury Caledonian. [volume] (St. Johnsbury, Vt.) 1867-1919, 1891-10-22
THE sILO SAVES GARDEN WA SITES.

A correspondent of the Rural New
Yorker writes as follows:
We are now-June 1O-pulling and
selling bunch onions, radishes, let
tuce, asparagus, etc, and have more
or less waste. This is all gathered
up every day and distributed in the
pans for the swine. l keep q number
of Berkshires, mostly sows, for
breeding purposes. l sell some of
the pigs while young; others are fat
tened with but little extra feed, and
butchered 1t home. and sold to men
who have families and are working
for me. We cure a full supply for
ourselves.
The first part of July we shall COM
mence cutting cabbage for market,
and then there will be large amount
of leaves that are really valuable for
feed if they are only cared for in time.
l have also little herd of Jersey
COWS, and the cabbage leaves are di-
vided between them and the swine.
1t is often said that they will flavor
both milk and butter in a disagree
able manner. We feed our COWS at
the time they are being MIXED, or
Immediately afterwards, and have
never found any disagreeable taste
or any bad results of any kind; and
during the fall we give the animals
about all they will eat both night
and morning. We stable them at
night the year round and from July
to freezing weather in the fail this is
one of their supplies of food.
We set out from $4,000 to 100000
cabbage plants per year and do our
best for large crops. This gives us a
good many wdgon-loads of nice,
fresh leaves late in the fall. They are
gathered and put into silo built for
this purpose, but for the last two
years we have put our small carrots
into it without topping, and find
that they keep nicely. These make
valuable winter food for breeding
sows even without any other feed,
and with only a little feed mixed
with them will keep growing pigs
doing we'll all winter.
Our small potatoes are put away
in the fall, and kept until spring, and
then boiled, and a little feed is mixed
with them then, and fed out as may
be needed. We have just hauled the
last ten bushels of them today. We
almost always have more fiat tur-
nips than we find market for, and
they are fed out both to the swine
and the young stock or cows not Civ
ing milk. The common purple-top
fiat turnip is worth much more for
feed than one would infer from our
chemists analyses. Weeds are also
gathered and thrown into the pens,
provided they do not contain fipe
seeds. In this manner we keep quite
a little drove of nice Berkshire hogs
in nice condition by purchasing only
a small amount of their feed.
We have a second silo for our COWS
and young stock. We have some
three or four paintings of sweet corn
Just as soon as the last picking of
understandable corn has been taken
from one planting, men go through
and cut the stalks, laying them in
small bundles. They are followed
by others with kind of cord which
we purchase very cheap, and these
tieup the stalks. These are followed
by the team and more men, who
load the bundles on a wagon and
carry them directly to the silo,
where they are put in without being
cut or unbound. We are somewhat
careful to pack them closely, and
after one planting is disposed of some