Part 9

Many are unwilling to buy a treatise upon the disease of the horse, although there are several which will _prevent_ most of the evils which affect this noble animal. In the West, the horse is used, in town and country, by almost every man. But very few profess to know how he should be treated! And, of those who think they are wise, how many have any knowledge except of a few nostrums for sickness? The horse, in man’s service, is living in an entirely artificial state. He takes care of himself if left wild. But living in stables, laboring every month of the year in harness, and under the saddle, not selecting his own food, but fed at the will of his master, his own instincts become of little use, and he is dependent entirely on the mercy and knowledge of those whose slave he is. It ought not to be thought unreasonable to say that every man who is willing to _own_ a horse, ought to be willing to know how to _manage_ him, in the stable and out of it. There is no work in the English language containing more, or better instructions than[2] Stewart’s Stable Economy. It should be read by the farmer; and just as much by every man, of whatever calling, who uses a horse, or owns one. It is of standard authority in England. Mr. Stewart has long been a professor in veterinary institutes. Every man ought to know how to treat a sick horse. Suppose a horse to be taken sick on a journey; most frequently the driver is the only one at hand to prescribe. If you are at a tavern, of what use, generally speaking, are the bragging pretensions of those that crowd around you? Stopping for a night at a wretched hole of a tavern, one of my horses, at night fell sick. I knew no more than a child what to do; the landlord (ah me! I shall never forget him!) was equally ignorant and much more indifferent. A big, bragging, English booby was the only one pretending to know what to do; and to him I yielded the animal. After sundry manipulations—punching him in the loins; pulling at his ears, etc.—he rolled up a wad of _hair from his tail_, and crammed it down the horse’s throat! presuming, I suppose, that the hair would find its way back to the place it came from, and so pilot the disease out! I inwardly resolved never to go another journey until in possession of the best remedies for the attacks common to horses on the road.

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PREPARING CUTTINGS IN THE FALL.—Cuttings of the currant, gooseberry, and grape are better if cut immediately on the fall of the leaf, plunged into moist sand two-thirds of their length, and placed in a cellar. If nature is as propitious to others as she has been to us, the cuttings will be found in the spring with the granulations completed at the lower end, and the roots just ready to push; and on being planted out, they grow off immediately, forming during the season well established plants.

[2] _A Treatise on the management of horses in relation to stabling, grooming, feeding, watering, and working_: published by A. O. Moore & Co., N. Y.

NINE MISTAKES.

In so far as instruction is concerned, I esteem my mistakes to be more valuable than my successful efforts. They excite to attention and investigation with great emphasis. I will record a few.

1. One mistake, which I record once for all, as it will probably occur every year, has been the attempting of more than I could do _well_. The ardor of spring, in spite of experience, lays out a larger garden, than can be well tended all summer.

2. In selecting the _largest_ lima beans for seed, I obtained most luxuriant vines, but fewer pods. If the season were longer these vines would ultimately be most profitable; but their vigor gives a growth too rampant for our latitude. If planted for a screen, however, the rankest growers are the best.

3. Of three successive plantings of corn, for table use, the first was the best, then the second, and the third very poor. I hoed and thinned the first planting myself, and thoroughly; the second, I left to a Dutchman, directing him how to do it; the third, I left to him without directions.

4. I bought a stock of roses in the _fall of the year_. All the loss of wintering came on me. If purchased in the spring, the nurserymen loses, if there is loss.

5. I planted the silver-leaved abele (_Populus alba_) in a rich sandy loam; in which it made more wood than it could ripen. The tree was top-heavy, and required constant staking. A poorer soil should have been selected.

6. I planted abundantly of flower-seeds—just before a drought. I neither covered the earth with mats, nor watered it—supposing that the seeds would come up after the first rain. But, in a cheerless and barren garden, I have learned that _heat_ will kill planted seeds, and that he who will be sure of flowers should not depend upon only one planting.

7. In the fall of 1843, I took up the bulbs of tuberoses, and wintered them safely upon the top of book-cases in a warm study. Having a better and larger stock in 1844, I would fain be yet more careful, and packed them in dry sand, and put them in a closet beyond the reach of frost. On opening them in the spring all were rotted save about half a dozen. Hereafter, I shall try the book-case.

8. We are told that glazed or painted flower-pots are not desirable, because, refusing a passage to superfluous moisture, they leave the roots to become sodden. In small stove-heated parlors, the evaporation is so great that glazed or painted flower-pots are _best_, because the danger is of dryness rather than dampness in _all plants growing in sandy loams or composts_.

9. I have resolved every summer for three years, to cut pea-brush during the winter and stack it in the shed; and every summer following, not having kept the vow, I have lacked pea-brush, being too busy to get it when it was needed, I have allowed the crop to suffer.

AGRICULTURAL SOCIETIES.

Many county societies were formed in 1836 and for some years flourished; few of them, we believe, exist now. We hope that the day has come for them to revive; and, that the experience of the past may not be lost, it is well to record the reasons why these county societies declined.

1. Just after their birth, came on the fatal years of fictitious prosperity; when every man expected a railroad on one side of his farm and a canal on the other—and when everybody was about to be exceedingly rich; not by legitimate business; not by producing wealth; but by the _rise of property_. Now the wealth of a farming community is always to arise from the products of the farm. Whatever withdraws attention from assiduous cultivation, or plants the hope of gain in other sources than in the herds, the dairy, the grain and the grass field, will, eventually, insure disappointment and even poverty, as many of our farmers can testify. It would be difficult for those who had not seen it, to imagine the fervent, sanguine, exulting, state of mind with which the whole community, at the time we speak of, looked for the wealth. Farms were to quadruple in value; pork was to be cashed at enormous prices; grain and grass, stock and fruit, were to swell the golden tide; and, for once, the world was to see great riches from little labor. Carelessness, waste, rashness, and incredible presumption were the result. Societies for the promotion of a careful and patient cultivation of the soil could not long be thought worthy of attention in a community which expected to be rich by a dexterous bargain, by one lucky speculation, by town lots, and shares, and that mysterious hum-bug—the rise of property.

2. Succeeding such days came the opposite extreme. Everybody was poor and expected to be poorer. There was no money and no market. Hogs were hardly salable, grain a drug, and all produce unavailable. Nothing was brisk but debt and debt collecting. Men were discouraged. Said they, “if one can sell nothing, there is no use in raising anything; twenty bushels an acre is as good as forty, when one can’t sell or use it.” Schools languished, public spirit died, business was totally deranged, and agricultural societies became extinct with the downfall of other useful institutions.

3. There were some things in the management of the societies which embarrassed them independently of these other causes. There was too much talk and pretension—wind work; the offices were taken for the honor—patient endurance of drudgery, which somebody must bear, was _shirked_ off. Men took little pains _between_ the meetings; everything was to be done at the time of meeting; and, of course, half done. This led to dissatisfaction. The mistakes of carelessness were attributed to partiality or prejudice. Some dropped off; others relaxed; and, when the excitement was gone, few cared to take the dull but real and necessary business.

4. Notwithstanding all these things, the county societies did a great deal of good. A skillful farmer told me, that in the county, where he resided, there was hardly a considerable farmer who did not try a few acres, at least, to see what he _could do_; and even many renters exhibited specimens of fine cultivation. More attention was paid to every part of the farm; and, for a time, everything felt the impulse.

A few words to those who may embark again in this good cause.

1. It is best to begin as you can hold out. A great meeting, a vast roll of by-laws, a regiment of officers, a parade of speeches, these make a fine meeting, and that’s all. Let a few stanch friends to improvement put their heads and hands together, without show or noise; begin at the little end, and hold fast what is gained.

2. In choosing officers, societies almost invariably steer upon one rock on which thousands have split. There is a desire to put great men into offices, to get their influence. In a mere public meeting of a day, this is well enough; but in a society which is to exist by efficient labor, it is suicide. Such men like to be puffed and published as presidents, chairmen, etc., etc., but that ends the matter. They go away and are not seen again till the next annual meeting, when, lo! a resurrection takes place; and they flame again, a whole year’s zeal exhibited in one day. It is best to select officers, who are well broken, of a good strain of blood, and who pull steadily, on hard ground, in the mud, over bridging, or upon turnpikes. In this way we may not have quite so large a show, but we shall have a steadily growing and efficient society.

3. In the award of premiums, more or less of dissatisfaction will always be felt. A man who has worked a whole year for a premium cannot be expected to lose it without some pain. Premiums should be awarded with great care, with scrupulous impartiality, and every effort made by the leading, substantial farmers to soothe and keep down everything like bitterness and faction, in consequence of disappointment.

4. It is _indispensable_ that agricultural papers should go hand in hand with agricultural societies. We will venture to say, that no society will long exist prosperously, which does not have a reading membership; and that a society can hardly fail to prosper if its members are regular readers of agricultural papers.

SHIFTLESS TRICKS.

To let the cattle fodder themselves at the stack; they pull out and trample more than they eat. They eat till the edge of appetite is gone, and then daintily pick the choice parts; the residue, being coarse and refuse, they will not afterwards touch.

To sell half a stack of hay and leave the lower half open to rain and snow. In feeding out, a hay knife should be used on the stack; in selling, either dispose of the whole, or remove that which is left to a shed or barn.

It is a shiftless trick to lie about stores and groceries, arguing with men that you have _no time_, in a new country, for nice farming—for making good fences; for smooth meadows without a stump; for draining wet patches which disfigure fine fields.

To raise your own frogs in your own yard; to permit, year after year, a dirty, stinking, mantled puddle to stand before your fence in the street.

To plant orchards, and allow your cattle to eat the trees up. When gnawed down, to save your money, by trying to nurse the stubs into good trees, instead of getting fresh ones from the nursery.

To allow an orchard to have blank spaces, where trees have died, and when the living trees begin to bear, to wake up and put young whips in the vacant spots.

It is very shiftless to build your barnyard so that every rain shall _drain_ it; to build your privy and dig your well close together; to build a privy of more than seven feet square—some shiftless folks have it of the size of the whole yard; to set it in the most exposed spot on the premises; to set it at the very far end of the garden, for the pleasure of traversing mud-puddles and labyrinths of wet weeds in rainy days.

It is a dirty trick to make bread without washing one’s hands after cleaning fish or chickens; to use an apron for a handkerchief; to use a veteran handkerchief just from the wars for an apron; to use milk-pans alternately for washbowls and milk. To wash dishes and baby linen in the same tub, either alternately or altogether; to chew snuff while you are cooking, for sometimes food will chance to be too highly spiced. We have a distinct but unutterable remembrance of a cud of tobacco in a dish of _hashed pork_—but it was before we were married!

A lady of our acquaintance, at a boarding-house, excited some fears among her friends, by foaming at the mouth, of madness. In eating a hash (made, doubtless, of every scrap from the table, not consumed the day before), she found herself blessed with a mouthful of _hard soap_, which only lathered the more, the more she washed at it. It is a filthy thing to comb one’s hair in a small kitchen in the intervals of cooking the breakfast; to use the bread trough for a cradle—a thing which we have undoubtedly seen; to put trunks, boxes, baskets, with sundry other utensils, under the bed where you keep the cake for company; we have seen a dexterous housewife whip the bed-spread aside, and bring forth, not what we feared, but a loaf-cake!

It is a dirty trick to wash children’s eyes in the pudding dish; not that the sore eyes, but subsequent puddings, will not be benefited; to wipe dishes and spoons on a hand-towel; to wrap warm bread in a dirty table-cloth; to make and mold bread on a table innocent of washing for weeks; to use dirty table-clothes for _sheets_, a practice of which we have had experimental knowledge, once at least in our lives.

The standing plea of all slatterns and slovens is, that “everybody must eat a peck of dirt before they die.” A peck? that would be a mercy, a mere mouthful, in comparison of cooked cart-loads of dirt which is to be eaten in steamboats, canal-boats, taverns, mansions, huts and hovels.

TOBACCO TRICKS.—It is a filthy trick to use it at all; and it puts an end to all our affected squeamishness at the Chinese taste, in eating rats, cats, and bird’s nests. It is a filthy trick to let the exquisite juice of tobacco trickle down the corners of one’s mouth; or lie in splashes on one’s coat, or bosom; to squirt the juice all over a clean floor, or upon a carpet, or baptismally to sprinkle a proud pair of andirons the refulgent glory of the much-scouring housewife. It is a vile economy to lay up for re-mastication a half-chewed cud; to pocket a half-smoked cigar; and finally to be-drench one’s self with tobacco juice, to so be-smoke one’s clothes that a man can be scented as far off as a whale-ship can be smelt at sea.

It is a shiftless trick to snuff a candle with your fingers, or your wife’s best scissors, to throw the snuff on the carpet, or on the polished floor, and then to extinguish it by treading on it!

To borrow a choice book; to read it with unwashed hands, that have been used in the charcoal bin, and finally to return it daubed on every leaf with nose-blood spots, tobacco spatter, and dirty finger-marks—this is a vile trick!

It is not altogether cleanly to use one’s knife to scrape boots, to cut harness, to skin cats, to cut tobacco, and then to cut apples which other people are to eat.

It is an unthrifty trick to bring in eggs from the barn in one’s coat pocket, and then to sit down on them.

It is a filthy trick to borrow of or lend for others’ use, a tooth-brush, or a tooth-pick; to pick one’s teeth at table with a fork, or a jack-knife; to put your hat upon the dinner table among the dishes; to spit generously into the fire, or at it, while the hearth is covered with food set to warm; for sometimes a man hits what he don’t aim at.

It is an unmannerly trick to neglect the scraper outside the door, but to be scrupulous in cleaning your feet after you get inside, on the carpet, rug, or andirons; to bring your drenched umbrella into the entry, where a black puddle may leave to the housewife melancholy evidence that you have been there.

It is soul-trying for a neat dairywoman to see her “man” watering the horse out of her milk-bucket; or filtering horse-medicine through her milk-strainer; or feeding his hogs with her water-pail; or, after barn-work, to set the well-bucket outside the curb and wash his hands out of it.

ELECTRO-CULTURE.

A few years ago, all the world was agog about electricity applied to vegetation. Sanguine persons grew red in the face with excitement, and enterprising schemers hoped to supersede all past processes of culture by this magical fluid. Things were to be made to grow not only as fast as lightning but _by_ lightning. Those mischievous bolts which had played their dangerous pranks with chimneys, oaks, and towers, were to be regularly harnessed and set to work in the field like horses or oxen. Many of our readers will recollect how widely the agricultural papers copied the glowing accounts brought from over the seas; and nobody was afraid of anything except of not believing enough.

Well, the lightning has been too smart for them; and the whole pack which opened loud on the scent, are now heard just as loud on the back track. It usually takes two foolings to satisfy the public. They first swing to an extreme folly of injudicious admiration, and them vibrate to the opposite extreme of disgust. Everybody was fever-hot with morus multicaulis; and then they went into chills about it. Durham stock brought almost their weight in silver at one time, and then could hardly be sold at butchers’ prices. Berkshire hogs were all the rage, and now are in great and unmerited contempt. The guano fever sent hundreds of ships a-dung-hunting all over the earth: and lucky were they who espied a precious heap of excrement. How little did the penguins and sea gulls of the Pacific imagine, that their unconscious observance of the laws of nature was one day to figure so largely on the British Exchange, and to raise such a bustle in chemical laboratories!

We believed but few of these accounts of electricity, because we perceived nothing which could be regarded as settled. And now, we are far from sympathizing with the recantations and apostasies from the electric faith. Like all other things driven to extremes, we shall by and by see it settle upon a middle point.

Editors are not without blame for these actions and reactions. Many of our best agricultural papers are connected with agricultural warehouses which deal largely in all articles for which there is an agricultural demand. Without the slightest intention of deception, nay, with a desire to act cautiously, such pecuniary interest may sensibly affect the judgment of sanguine editors. But the wish to issue a spicy paper, full of life and surprise, inclines an editor to publish whatever is new, without a scrutiny of its truth. With a few honorable exceptions of standard periodicals, we scarcely take an agricultural paper which does not contain most absurd stories gravely indited without a word of comment. Now, it seems to us that agricultural papers ought not to be the common sewers of news, full of waste and refuse matter; but registers of rigid facts and scientific expositors of the principles deducible from facts. Farmers are at fault also in the matter. An editor who depends for his support upon the proceeds of his paper, must be a man of rare independence if he can shield himself from the selfish influence of those who are his best supporters. Men that have a novelty, a new and precious jewel of a flower, a heavy stock of nursery commodities, or large herds of fancy stock, sheep or swine, can afford to circulate widely and praise any paper that will circulate widely and praise their special interest. A sanguine editor inditing a eulogistic article, with a red-hot speculator whispering at each ear, will be very likely to lead many simple farmers astray. Such articles, copied by newspapers, spread the infection beyond the circle of subscribers. Farmers that take, and farmers that do not take the paper will be deceived.

Now, let husbandmen give to their agricultural papers such a support as shall leave the editors free from temptations to listen to interested persons; let them contribute so freely of their observations that editors will not have to draw upon their imagination for facts, and the agricultural press will become sober, stable, accurate, and so, profitable.

SINGLE-CROP FARMING.

It is extensively the practice of large farmers, to put their whole force upon one staple article; a style of farming as full of risk, as it would be to invest a whole fortune in one kind of property. At the South, we have cotton plantations; nothing but cotton is raised. If the market and the season happen to be propitious, enormous profits are made. If markets, or the planting or picking season are adverse, the year is lost; for it was staked on one article; all the risks of the year, instead of being distributed, were concentrated. Another plantation cultivates sugar exclusively; and the ambitious planter has his pockets full or empty, according to chances which he cannot foresee, calculate, or overrule.

At the North, some farmers put in nothing but wheat; others, nothing but corn. One relies on the hay crop; another makes or loses a year’s profits on cattle. In each case, if the staple raised happens to _hit_, in every respect profits roll in like a flood. But such operations leave no margin for those casualties, and annual changes, which are inevitable.

Ireland, relying upon the potato as a support for a large mass of its poverty-stricken people, is visited with famine if this crop is shaken. The failure of the grain crop, in England, strikes panic into the whole nation.