If your stables are old, examine the floor; or some night may let a horse through, to come out lame for life. If you have a dirt floor, see that it is carefully laid, and remember that if it be inclined either way, it should be _from_ the rack and not _toward_ it. Let your wagons, carts, plows, etc., be repaired during the fall and winter, and not be left till spring. See that your shingles are all sound on the house, barn, and shed. The leak which you have allowed to drop, drop, drop all summer has at last taken off a yard or two of plaster, and it is time now to put on a shingle or two. There is another leak or two that _must_ be stopped. That pocket of yours which has let out dime after dime for liquor, the hole getting bigger and bigger every year, now is the time to sow _it_ up, or it will rip _you_ up. A pocket is a small place, to be sure, but we have seen barns, cattle, and acre after acre slip through a hole in it which, at first, was only large enough to let sixpence through.
See that all your tools have a safe and dry standing-place; hoes, rakes, scythes, sickles, yokes, spades, shovels, chains, pins, harrows, plows, carts, and sleds, axes, mattocks, hammers, and everything, but your geese and ducks, should be kept from wet and snow.
If you have no stables for your cattle, you should have good sheds provided, opening to the south. Even when cattle are allowed to run through the stock-fields, there ought to be in some warm place an ample shed to which they can resort during wet and cold weather; and one sufficiently snug can be made without calling in the carpenter or buying lumber.
We mention some of the more common kinds of garden esculent vegetables, to point out the best kinds, and give some hints for their cultivation. If more vegetables were raised and eaten in the place of meat, there would be fewer diseases, and less expense for medicine than is now the case among those who eat so heartily and liberally of the _fat_ of the land.
BEET.—The turnip-rooted blood beet should be sown for the earliest crop; the long blood beet for the late crop, and for winter use. The _blood beet_ is the proper garden beet. The _scarcity_, the sugar beets (so called), white, yellow, and red, are inferior for table use. Every year we see accounts of new varieties, which are seldom mentioned a second time, while these old standard sorts hold their own from year to year. We see people running around among their neighbors for _beet_-seed, careless whether it is early or late, coarse fleshed or fine grained, sweet or insipid. It is just as easy and cheap to have the best seed of the best kinds, as to have refuse seed of worthless kinds. Lately, a variety introduced from France, called _Bassano_, has attracted attention and commendation.[11] It is early, tender, and sweet. If you attempt to raise your own seed, let only _one_ sort stand in the garden; otherwise bees and other insects will mix them, and the purity of the variety will be lost. We very seldom see an unmixed variety in common gardens, unless seed have been bought from good seedsmen.