STRAWBERRIES FOR THE FARMERS. I87 



within reach of the table and use its contents liberally on the 

 strawberries. Heap that bowl up not once, but two or three 

 times and feed on it, not once, but three times a day, and when 

 vou need a lunch come in and heap it up again. That is the way 

 we do at our house, because we are not professionals in growing- 

 strawberries. (The president: "But you are in eating"). (Laugh- 

 ter.) We can get away with a bushel a day at our house easily, 

 and our family is not large either. Because this is so simple, and 

 because I would like to see every family in the state grow a few 

 strawberries of their own, it is because of this that I want to tell 

 you the way we do it. 



It is easier to grow a crop of strawberries than it is to grow 

 a crop of corn in Minnesota. I want you to take that with you. 

 It is easier to grow a crop of strawberries in Minnesota than it 

 is to grow a crop of corn, and I think you are just as sure of a 

 crop, too. Prepare the ground in good shape for a crop of corn, 

 and you have prepared it in good shape for strawberries, and any 

 of you, even if you have never grown strawberries, can do that. 

 Do not wait ten years or five or six years to prepare the ground. 

 The best way to do is to make up your mind to grow strawber- 

 ries, then pick out the place where you want your strawberry 

 bed and put on all the extra manure you have in your barnyard. 

 Put on a good thick bed of manure and plow it under. As soon 

 as you get that out of sight put on another and put that in with 

 the disc, and then put on another and keep working it in thor- 

 oughly. You need not hunt around for good ground ; mine is 

 on what was the worst ground on the farm, nothing but clay and 

 about four inches of black soil. You can get it in good shape 

 very quickly. 



In the spring when the catalogues come out th.ere are so many 

 varieties that we do not know what to pick out. Now plant 

 about five rows, say about 150 feet long, of Splendid, Bederwood, 

 Warfield, Lovett and' Crescent, in about that order, and if you 

 don't get strawberries out of that combination you will not 

 amount to anything. If you want other varieties after you have 

 become interested, you can easily add good varieties to this list. 

 Just to show you how simple this is, I kept track last spring 

 while we were setting out plants, and two of us did not have to 

 work hard to set out two hundred plants in an hour. 



Then the next thing after they are set out and the ground is 

 in good shape for growing comes the matter of cultivation. I 

 was talking with a man in St. Paul about growing potatoes, and I 

 told him that cultivation must be practised even if a weed did not 



