Soil Culture: Containing a Comprehensive View of Agriculture, Horticulture, Pomology, Domestic Animals, Rural Economy, and Agricultural LiteratureWalden, J. H.
Science
Soil Culture: Containing a Comprehensive View of Agriculture, Horticulture, Pomology, Domestic Animals, Rural Economy, and Agricultural Literature
Walden, J. H.
Agriculture -- Handbooks, manuals, etc.
The growth of bushes over pastures, along fences, and in the streets,
shows a great want of thrift, and an unpardonable carelessness in a
farmer. In pastures, so far from being harmless, they take so much from
the soil as to materially injure the quality and quantity of the grass.
The only truly effectual method of destroying noxious shrubs, is by
grubbing them up with a mattock. Frequent cutting of bushes inclining to
spread only increases the difficulty, by giving strength and extension
to the roots. Cutting bushes thoroughly in August, in a wet season, and
applying manure and plaster to promote the growth of grass, will
sometimes quite effectually destroy them. Larger trees, as the sweet
locust, that are troublesome on account of sprouting out from the
roots, when cut down, are effectually killed by girdling two feet from
the ground, and allowing to stand one year. The tree, roots, and all,
are sure to die.
BUTTER.
Raising the cream, churning, working, and preserving, are the points in
successful butter-making. To raise cream, milk may be set in tin, wood,
or cast-iron dishes. The best are iron, tinned over on the inside. Tin
is better than wood, only on account of its being more easily kept
clean. No one can ever make good butter without keeping everything about
the dairy perfectly clean and sweet. Milk should never stand more than
three inches deep in the pans, to raise the best and most cream. It
should be set in an airy room, containing nothing else. Butter and milk
will collect and retain the flavor of any other substance near them,
more readily than anything else; hence, milk set in a cellar containing
onions, or in a room with new cheese, makes butter highly flavored with
those articles.
_Temperature_ is an important matter. It should be regular, at from
fifty to fifty-five degrees of Fahrenheit's thermometer. It is sometimes
difficult to be exact in this matter, but come as near it as possible.
This can be well regulated in a good cool cellar, into which air can be
plentifully admitted at pleasure. Those who are so situated that their
milk-house can stand over a spring, with pure water running over its
stone floor, are favored. Those who will take pains to lay ice in their
milk-rooms, in very warm weather, will find it pay largely in the
quality and quantity of their butter. Those who will not follow either
of the above directions, must be content to make less butter, and of
rather inferior quality, out of the same quantity of milk.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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