114 MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



stop absorbing the water from the ground and injuring the trees be- 

 fore the water is needed. The peas do well. The best way to make 

 them pay is to have some kind like the Surprise pea that sells for a 

 good price for seed, raising a crop and selling it to the seedsmen. 

 In that way I can kill two birds with one stone and can cover the 

 ground during part of the season when it is necessary to do it with 

 little expense to the fruit trees. 



Mr. J. S. Harris : When I was a younger kid my father used to 

 practice sowing peas in his orchard, a June pea. We would take a 

 few messes of them to eat, and after those peas began to harden he 

 would turn in a drove of pigs, and they would harrow the soil and 

 eat the peas before the apples began to drop. He did that for two 

 years in succession and then sowed the ground to clover, and when 

 that came up well he would run the plow in and turn it under very 

 shallow. He had the reputation of having the healthiest fruit and 

 the best trees in the neighborhood, and the lio^s and the fruit made a 

 good harvest, and it saved wormy fruit. About rotating fruit crops : 

 I have had a little experience if I am young. I have never yet suc- 

 ceeded in getting a second good stand of raspberries from the same 

 ground unless I cultivated it to something else after taking them off. 

 Now black raspberries are not profitable after three years, and in 

 planting right in the first place, that is four feet each way, you take 

 off two crops and then take out every other row. We find strawber- 

 ries succeed admirably, and then we plant to potatoes. We also find 

 that raspberries succeed very well after putting the ground into 

 strawberries, but with raspberries it is impossible to get a crop from 

 the same ground again. I had one piece of ground from wliich I 

 took three thousand quarts of strawberries the first year. I run it an- 

 other year and then plowed it under, and although I gave it the same 

 care as the first year I did not get half a yield. 



Mr. C. W. Merritt : In speaking about rotating strawberries, I 

 will say that we do not raise many strawberries. We have three 

 patches of ground we use for that purpose, and we set one of them, 

 and the next season we plant one of the others and set the third one 

 cut to something else, and the third year we dig up the first one and 

 reset the third one and so keep them two years apart all the time. In 

 that way we get the best result from the strawberry land. 



Mr. Harris : Is your second crop as good as the first? 



Mr. Merritt: Oh, yes; we don't notice any difference. We set 

 enough plants the first season so they thoroughly fill out the ground. 

 As for raspberries and blackberries, they should never be set among 

 the trees. They will scratch the trees and injure them, but I think 

 red raspberries are excellent. 



Prune off all broken ends of roots before .planting the trees, always 

 cutting from the under side. When the root is thus smoothly cut it will 

 callous over quickly. 



