SMALL FRUITS FOR THE FARM AND GARDEN. 425 



SMALL FRUITS FOR THE FARM AND GARDEN. 



BY S. W. GIBSON, OF BBLLEVUE. 

 [Read at the Charlotte Institute, February 16, 1887.] 



The subject mentioned to me as the title of an essay to be read before 

 this Farmers' Institute was "Small Fruits for the Farm and Garden." Of 

 course someone must be provided to tell the farmers how easy and pleasant 

 it is for them to have a good supply of the finest fruit from their own gar- 

 dens throughout the season, and this year it was to be my duty to speak of 

 the merits of the different varieties and to offer again the information which 

 has been presented year after year in catalogues and in all the agricultural 

 and most of the religious as well as secular papers. Now, let me ask you plainly 

 what good this all does. Does any one profit by it? Does the farmer take 

 notes, go home, order the varieties you recommend, and lay out his ground as 

 you have advised? Does he carefully prune and weed and cultivate and har- 

 vest as you suggest ? Forgive me if I intimate that he does no such thing. He 

 comes up to these Institutes to meet his old friends, to hear the learned pro- 

 fessors from Lansing and any others who have become experts in any depart- 

 ment of the farm work in which he himself is interested. If his wife and 

 daughters are not with him he tells them on his return home that Mr. So- 

 and-so talked to us about small fruits and told us we might just as well raise 

 lots of them as not, but, he adds, let him try it and he'd find that a 

 man that did his duty by his farm had no time to fool away with gar- 

 den fruits. Now, while I will freely agree with you that the farmer mighty 

 if he would raise small fruits, I do not at all wonder that he does not do so, 

 nor do I look for any considerable improvement in this direction. The grow- 

 ing of small fruits is a business of itself and very few farmers who under- 

 take to raise a supply, even for their own use, ever accomplish much. Indeed, 

 the question is asked every year, with more and more seriousness, do small 

 fruits pay the man who grows them for market? Parker Eavle says that the 

 right man in the right place may yet do reasonably well raising small fruits 

 for the market, but, he says, he had better not try to do anything else. Com- 

 petition is so sharp, and the markets are so well occupied that only the man 

 who brings a high degree of skill, patience and perseverence can hope to suc- 

 ceed. How many have we all known who have gone into " the small fruit 

 business" with enthusiasm, believing that theij were sure of success andwealth? 



Only a few days ago a man whom I have known in three years as a keeper 

 of a feed store, then of a meat store, and more recently as an expressman, 

 told me with great earnestness that there was no one near Battle Creek who 

 was a scientific fruit man, and that he was going into the business next 

 spring. When 1 suggested to him that the market was certainly pretty well 

 supplied, and that I knew many farmers were setting berry plants by the acre, 

 and that I looked for a time to come very soon when it would not pay to 

 market berries at the prices they would bring, he smiled knowingly and said 

 that he would have good land close by the town and he could get the start of 

 the others by going at it in a more thorough way. So he and a good many 

 others will go into the business, and in about two or three years they will go 

 out again, generally poorer and wiser. 



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