Notes on Current Topics.

FARM ECONOMY.

Now, if one wants to ascertain how many agricultural implements are used by the farmers of the West, let him take a trip across the country for a day or two, and he will see reapers and mowers, and hay rakes and cultivators, and plows and seeders, standing in the fields and meadows, at the end of the rows where they had last been used. A stranger might think that this is not the place for them at this particular time of year. But in this he shows his ignorance of Western farm economy—for it is the very place for them; the identical locality where a great many of our farmers choose to keep their costly implements. Besides—don't you see, our farmers believe in fostering the manufactures of our country; and this place of caring for their tools after using them adds 15 or 20 per cent to the business of the manufacturers.

ABOUT THE BORER.

I referred to the fact that I had lately been cutting away, digging up, and making stove-wood of a number of dead and decaying apple trees. Some of them had been dead and dying for two or three years. In splitting up the body and roots of one of these, I dislodged scores of the borers, of all ages and sizes—making quite a dinner for a hen and chickens that happened to be nigh. This fact brought forcibly to my mind what I should have thought of before, namely—that these dead and dying trees ought not to be allowed to remain a day after their usefulness has departed; but should be removed bodily and consigned to the flames. Otherwise they remain as breeding places for the pests, to the great detriment of the rest of the orchard. Cut away your decaying trees at once.

COAL ASHES.

Now that coal has become so common as a substitute for wood for fuel, not only on the railroads and manufactories, but in the villages and on the farms, wood ashes will still be harder to procure. Though not near so valuable for the purposes for which wood ashes is chiefly used in horticulture, it is believed that ashes from the coal has too great a value to be wasted. It should all be saved and applied to some good purpose on the garden or orchard. Has any one tried it as a preventive to pear blight? or mildew on the gooseberry? or the grape rot? or for the yellows or leaf-curl in peach trees? or for the rust in the blackberry and raspberry? In any or all of these it may have a decided value, and should be faithfully experimented with. As an absorbent alone it ought to be worth saving, to use in retaining the house slops and other liquid manures that are too often wasted.

ONE CAUSE OF FAILURE

in our orchard trees, of which we read and hear so much in late years, is doubtless to be found in the fact that we fail to feed them properly. A hog will fail to put on fat if he is not fed; a hen will not lay eggs if she is starved for food; and is it more reasonable to expect an apple or a peach or a pear tree to thrive and grow and yield of its luscious fruit in perfection while it is being starved? Our fresh soils—some of them at least—contain a fair proportion of the food needed to support the life of a tree; we plant our orchards, and for some years, more or less, they give us paying returns for our investments. But that food will not always last; it is gradually exhausted, and we fail to feed them again, or in that proportion their necessities require. They languish and die; a disease seizes them, and we complain and grumble at the dispensations of Providence.

Think of it, fellow fruit-growers; let us begin to treat our fruit trees as we do our hogs and our hens, and see if we can not be favored with corresponding results. It is doubtless true that many of the diseases to which our trees are subject are caused by starvation, or by improper feeding; and a sickly tree is much more certain to be attacked by insects than a healthy one.

Rare, indeed, is the case where a tree is carefully fed and cared for, and its wants regularly and bountifully supplied, that it does not repay as bountifully in its life-giving fruits.

T. G.