IT is strange that few people except the real poultry-farmers realise that July is one of the most important months in the year. The desire to have eggs in zero weather invariably compels good attention to the hens during the winter. Baby chicks arouse interest in the spring, but as the weather gets warmer, eggs are plentiful, and the pretty, fluffy babies developed into long, lanky creatures, who seem nothing but a nuisance specially ordained to destroy the garden, so the poor things are shut up in small quarters and woefully neglected. During the fall and winter I am repeatedly asked how to make pullets and hens lay, but I can rarely suggest a remedy, because nine times out of ten it is the result of blunders made during the preceding summer.