Making Home ProfitableSaint Maur, Kate V. (Kate Vandenhoff)
Science
Making Home Profitable
Saint Maur, Kate V. (Kate Vandenhoff)
Agriculture; Country life
Constant culling and marketing is one of the great secrets of success.
Culling must be observed just as rigidly when selecting winter stock.
Discard any faulty birds. There are always some in every flock, even
if the parent birds have been blue-ribbon specimens: Crooked tails
or feet, ear-lobes which are red instead of white, or white instead
of red, according to the variety you may be keeping. Wyandottes,
Orpingtons, Plymouth Rocks, Brahmas or Cochins should all have
bright-red ear-lobes. Leghorns, Minorcas and Andalusians should be pure
white. It is a bright, energetic-looking pullet which makes the best
layer, and it is not profitable to keep any but the best layers, so put
them into small pens and fatten. The young roosters bring good prices
in the fall, and their absence from the farm reduces feed-bills and
prevents crowding in the house, which is always disastrous.
Do not delay, after September first, in getting the pullets into their
winter quarters, for it is most important that they become accustomed
to their new surroundings and reconciled to the change from free range
to semi-inactivity. It often takes five or six weeks for them to become
accustomed to the new conditions, and, unless they have time to adjust
themselves, they won’t start laying until cold weather sets in, which
means that the egg-crop is likely to be unprofitably delayed.
JULY IN THE POULTRY-YARD
It is strange that few people except the real poultry-farmers realise
that July is one of the most important months in the year. The desire
to have eggs in zero weather invariably compels good attention to the
hens during the winter. Baby chicks arouse interest in the spring, but
as the weather gets warmer, eggs are plentiful, and the pretty, fluffy
babies developed into long, lanky creatures, who seem nothing but a
nuisance specially ordained to destroy the garden, so the poor things
are shut up in small quarters and woefully neglected. During the fall
and winter I am repeatedly asked how to make pullets and hens lay, but
I can rarely suggest a remedy, because nine times out of ten it is the
result of blunders made during the preceding summer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account