STATE POMOLOGICAI, SOCIETY. 93 



looked at me in astonishment and surprise. I said, "That is 

 very simple ; we set our strawberry plants from the first to the 

 middle of May and get ripe strawberries on them any time 

 during the fruiting season in June, provided we want to do 

 that." But it is a tax on the plant. And whether you set in 

 rows, matted rows or hills, is a question of how your land is, 

 or a question as to whether you want to raise a large quantity 

 of nice berries or a large quantity of poor ones. I believe abso- 

 lutely in setting strawberries for fruit in hills, that is, not ex- 

 actly the way we used to set them, two or three feet apart and 

 then a row for the horse to cultivate through, but beds where 

 the plants are set from fourteen to eighteen inches apart in the 

 bed, three or four rows according to the width you set the 

 plants in the rows. In that way you give the plants a good 

 chance to develop evenly all around, you get a bed that you 

 can cultivate with practically very little expense, and a bed 

 that in the long run will produce almost twice the amount that 

 matted rows will. Then of course there is the narrow matted 

 row or the hedge row, which again is far preferable to the wide 

 matted row you so often see in strawberries. The advantage 

 of the hills, in the matter of cultivation, over anything else is 

 that you do not have to do much of any work about weeding 

 or caring for the plants or taking runners off. In this way I 

 have cultivated practically half an acre each year in hills and 

 have not had to do any hand pulling of weeds whatever. The 

 beds are cultivated the long way with the wheel hoe and across 

 with the hand wheel hoe. The plants are set regularly in 

 square blocks so we can go across the whole bed one way and 

 then the other way with the wheel hoe, alternating the kind of 

 wheel. We can keep that land practically clean and a dust mulcli 

 on it which will conserve the moisture and in dry weather we 

 have no difficulty. I use for the hand hoe a Planet jr. and a 

 Daisy hoe ; one has a flat plate like a hoe, the other very fine 

 teeth. We run the teeth one way one week, and the other way 

 the next week, alternating with the scuffle hoe, as it is commonly 

 called, and in that way we keep the ground in the most perfect 

 condition mechanically. I have seen the time this summer when 

 we have had periods of two months with no rain whatever, and 

 our land is apt to dry out, and the strawberry plants did not 

 suffer the least bit. I almost gave up the strawberry business 



