176 MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



beds. Of the Lovett and Bubach, I had a picker thirteen years old 

 that picked 230 quarts in ten hours while working by the day. A. 

 G. Kellogg & Richardson, of Webster City, Iowa, on twelve acres, 

 with about one hundred pickers picked six thousand quarts a day. 

 My boys, at Janesville, last year, picked from five acres three 

 thousand two hundred quarts a day. 



With plenty of experience, good land well-prepared, good kinds 

 well-planted, a good season, a good market, a good man or woman 

 with brains and muscle and the "know how," there is no limit to 

 productiveness and profit in the strawberry business. The "know 

 how" is almost as necessary as it was to the engineer who charged 

 fifty dollars and fifty cents to start the machinery in the factory, 

 the fifty cents was for the work, the fifty dollars was for the "know 

 how." But there is a large proportion to the ivark in the straw- 

 berry business ; but any one going into it on a large scale better go 

 and work one season for nothing and learn of some one else the 

 "know how." Everybody that has a square rod of ground ought 

 to raise his own strawberries, but to make it a business is another 

 thing. Our books are full of instructions, and any one with muscle 

 and common sense may make a partial success of it. 



Soil and location : Any good garden soil, and, if raising to sell, 

 any good market. I had a singular experience trying to raise a big 

 crop from new woods soil where Indians had had a corn field ; 

 part of the plat was covered with hazel brush ten feet high and 

 wild crab apples. After the first crop of turnips, I planted nine- 

 teen varieties of strawberries, including such kinds as Wilson, 

 Crescent, Capt. Jack and other best sorts, expecting that on twency 

 acres of new land I should find a gold mine. The crop was hardly 

 worth picking, while just over the fence on ground that had been 

 worked for twenty-five years without manure the same kinds gave 

 260 bushels per acre. I cleared off that whole twenty acres of wood 

 lot, but strawberries would do nothing till it had been cropped 

 about five years. There was too much leaf mould, and while other 

 crops were a success, strawberries, for the first five years, were a 

 failure. 



The hedge row system will bring larger and finer fruit but less 

 in quantity, and except for special markets it will not pay the com- 

 mercial grower. 



Varieties to plant? I have hardly been in the business long 

 enough to answer that question. After following the business forty- 

 seven years at Janesville, I quit and turned it over to the boys. I 

 moved to Lake Mills and set out eightv varieties of strawberries to 



