142 MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



twenty-five years gave me 210 bushels to the acre. You can prove 

 anything- in horticulture. (Laughter). 



Mrs. Bonniwell: I picked several hundred quarts off of a quarter 

 of an acre. 



Mr. H. F. Busse: I would like to ask Mr. Kellogg if the timber 

 land was the same kind of land as that across the road? 



Mr. Kellogg: Yes, sir. I would say that we plowed in leached 

 ashes by the load, and we found very little benefit in using leached 

 ashes; unleached ashes should be used. 



Pres. Underwood: I think I have told you of a little experience I 

 am familiar with that happened to Mr. Martin Cook, of Rochester. 

 He is a good cultivator, does things well, a man who cannot bear to 

 do a thing unless he does it well. He prepared five acres of ground 

 in the best possible way, as he thought, for growing strawberries. 

 My wife and I were at his place when he told me about his experi- 

 ence. Being very conveniently situated for obtaining manure at 

 Rochester, he put on lots of it. I think his land is a sandy loam 

 and, I presume likely, a clay subsoil. I think there is gravel in the 

 soil. 



Mr. J. S. Harris: Gravel and sand. 



Pres. Underwood: He put on a great many loads of manure to the 

 acre and fitted that land up in such shape that he had the finest five 

 acre patch for a strawberry bed he ever prepared. In another patch 

 across the road he had three acres all grown up to grass and weeds, 

 and he started a man in to plow it up. There were strawberry 

 plants running around among the weeds, but he did not like to see 

 so many weeds so he started to plow it up, but after the man had 

 plowed a quarter of a dajr he stopped him. The result of that sea- 

 son's crop was that on the five acres he did not get anything, while 

 on the old patch that was grown up with weeds he got a good crop, 

 about all the crop he had that year. We were trying to bring out 

 between us the proper way to prepare the ground, and his experi- 

 ence demonstrated clearly to his mind that he had put on too much 

 manure, and I am of the opinion that the condition of that new 

 soil Mr. Kellogg speaks of was similar to that of Martin Cook's after 

 he got it prepared. New soil is different in locations. There are 

 different kinds of new soil as well as different kinds of old soil, and 

 in growing strawberries it is the condition of the soil, the kind of 

 soil we must take into consideration, whether new or old. 



Mr. Kellogg: This piece I planted, this new land, was full of little 

 roots and big roots, and the leaf mold had been accumulating for 

 a thousand years to my own knowledge. (Laughter and applause). 



Mr. Wyman Elliot: Are you a brother of Methusalah? (Laughter). 

 I have been listening to this discussion with a great deal of pleas- 

 ure. I believe that is the proper idea in preparing the soil, as Mr. 

 Sampson states. I want to relate a little experience I had some 

 twenty odd years ago. I had some prairie soil that had been crop- 

 ped with wheat, corn, vegetables, etc., for ten or fifteen years. It was 

 prairie soil, what you would call a light, sandy loam, with hard-pan 

 under it, the yellow, sandy hard-pan and clay. The soil was about 

 ten or twelve inches deep, and then you came on to this yellow hard- 



