STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



89 



between the rows about two inches deep with clean straw, leaves, 

 evergreen boughs, marsh hay, or best of all sorgum stalks from 

 the sugar mill. 



Spring treatment for early fruit; remove the mulch, cultivate 

 lightly, replace the mulch, tucking it nicely under the plants and 

 fruit. 



For the main crop poke off just enough mulch so the plants 

 can get through, hand weed sufficient to keep down all rank growth 

 till picking, after which cultivate and keep clean. After second 

 crop if the ground is foul, turn it under. 



If you are growing for market, you should have your boxes all 

 ready before picking time. 



For the past two years I have used a conductor's punch and a 

 card like this: 



The letters all punched out will indicate 300 

 quarts. A string at the top will suspend it to 

 the neck of the picker who keeps it till pay 

 day. 



In the last thirty years I have not had so 

 near a failure as on one acre of new ground, 

 cleared of black oak, wild crab and hazlebrush 

 ten feet high and one inch in diameter, strong, 

 light soil, rich in leaf mould, planted one year 

 after breaking with old standard varieties and 

 choice new kinds, and after three years' faithful 

 trial, having a good stand of plants and good 

 bloom, the best kinds failed to produce over 

 fifty bushels per acre, while on adjoining land 

 twenty-five years to crops without manure pro- 

 duced with less care 265 bushels by actual 

 measurement per acre, in an unfavorable sea- 

 son. 



On a portion of this new land when the 

 strawberries were turned under last spring on 

 sixty-five rods of ground I harvested 12,400 pounds of sugar cane 

 for the mill; 4,600 .pounds small cane seed and fodder. The yield 

 of the cane to the mill was ninety-two gallons of choice syrup; so 

 that in my riper years I have been more successful "raising Cain" 

 than when a boy. 



Wyman Elliot. I was with Mr. Kellogg last June when he 

 visited the strawberry plantation where the big record of a day's 



