CELLARS.
Examine your cellars frequently at all seasons, especially in spring, when vegetables are sprouting and decaying. The effluvia from decomposing vegetable matter will engender disease. Have everything of the kind removed, with all mouldy articles, boxes, barrels, tubs, especially such as have contained vegetables, pickles, either of meats or vegetables, fish or spirits, vinegar, wines, or decaying matter of any kind. Leave the doors and windows open frequently for airing; whitewash at least once a year, and fumigate, if any disagreeable odors be present, with chloride of lime. Attention to such matters may save the lives of your family. Surely worth the pains. Typhoid fevers, cholera, etc. are engendered in this way.
Never suffer a foul drain, gutter, or sink to have place in your establishment. If you find it necessary to have a sink in your kitchen for carrying off water, take care it is scalded out every day with hot lye or soapsuds.
Manure piles should be placed as far as possible from the house and covered with charcoal.
In the autumn, when the leaves become dry and fall from the trees around your house, have them gathered out of your yards and put away in some convenient place, to cover your potato-beds in the spring. They make excellent manure, too. But having deprived your trees of this natural fertilizer, take care to sprinkle around them a good supply of pulverized manure or guano. Especially on your grass-plots should you do this.
When wood is cut, have all the chips of any size picked up and put away for kindling fires, leaving the small ones to become manure for your garden. These form a very superior fertilizer, especially for flowers.
THE FAMILY KITCHEN GARDENER, by Robert Buist (November 14, 1805-July 13, 1880)
Examine your cellars frequently at all seasons, especially in spring, when vegetables are sprouting and decaying. The effluvia from decomposing vegetable matter will engender disease. Have everything of the kind removed, with all mouldy articles, boxes, barrels, tubs, especially such as have contained vegetables, pickles, either of meats or vegetables, fish or spirits, vinegar, wines, or decaying matter of any kind. Leave the doors and windows open frequently for airing; whitewash at least once a year, and fumigate, if any disagreeable odors be present, with chloride of lime. Attention to such matters may save the lives of your family. Surely worth the pains. Typhoid fevers, cholera, etc. are engendered in this way.
Never suffer a foul drain, gutter, or sink to have place in your establishment. If you find it necessary to have a sink in your kitchen for carrying off water, take care it is scalded out every day with hot lye or soapsuds.
Manure piles should be placed as far as possible from the house and covered with charcoal.
In the autumn, when the leaves become dry and fall from the trees around your house, have them gathered out of your yards and put away in some convenient place, to cover your potato-beds in the spring. They make excellent manure, too. But having deprived your trees of this natural fertilizer, take care to sprinkle around them a good supply of pulverized manure or guano. Especially on your grass-plots should you do this.
When wood is cut, have all the chips of any size picked up and put away for kindling fires, leaving the small ones to become manure for your garden. These form a very superior fertilizer, especially for flowers.
THE FAMILY KITCHEN GARDENER, by Robert Buist (November 14, 1805-July 13, 1880)