I don’t believe in sacrificing the garden to the chickens, but I do think they should be properly controlled. A roll of two-inch-mesh wire netting five feet high costs only about four dollars. At the price of eggs nowadays a few dozen will pay for it. Posts can be cut in the wood-lot on most farms, so a yard for a good-sized flock can easily be made for less than five dollars. The best plan is to run a division fence down the centre, so the birds can be confined in one half alternately, for by such means a supply of green food can be kept growing until frost. The ground should be ploughed, and seeded to rye or oats, before the wire is put up. If poultry is to be profitable, the old and young stock must be kept apart, because it is impossible to feed correctly when they are all together. Young birds need plenty of nutritious food to push them along quickly, and laying hens must be put on special rations to bring about early molting, which is the foundation of a good winter supply of eggs. About July 5th commence to cut down the feed gradually, until at the end of two weeks forty hens are having only a pint of oats and a pint of wheat mixed, night and morning. Scatter it amongst cut straw or some litter, so they will have to scratch for every grain. The first of August commence to increase the rations, and keep it up for a week, so that by the fifteenth they are getting two quarts of mash in the morning, a quart of meat scraps and a pint of cracked corn at noon and wheat and oats or barley at night. Give them just about all they will eat up clean in fifteen minutes. The morning mash should be composed of two parts ground feed (corn and oats), one part white middlings and one part oil-meal, mixed with scalding milk or water. The semi-starvation followed by the heavy feed forces the moulting season and allows plenty of time to feather out and get into condition before October, when their rations should be made up of the essentials for egg-production, which are clover hay, bran, wheat, corn and animal food. You see, it takes about three months for hens to get rid of their old feathers and put on a new coat, and if the process is not forced in some way, they will not commence before August, which would make it October before they finished. Of course that would be time enough if it happened to be a warm, late fall, but if cold winter weather sets in, as it often does in November, hens would not lay before spring, as moulting leaves them in a more or less debilitated condition.