THE MINNESOTA 
HORTICULTURIST. 
VOL...23 SEPTETDIBER, 1895. NO, 8. 
AN EXPERIMENT IN IRRIGATION. 
PROF. E. S. GOFF, WIS. EXP. STATION. 
As is well known, the strawberry plant quickly suffers from an 
insufficient water supply—an event which,in our climate, frequently 
occurs in June, the most critical time for the strawberry harvest. 
Rather late in the summer of 1893, arrangements were made for ir- 
rigating our small fruit grounds from Lake Mendota, to which they 
are adjacent, and in 1894 our strawberry beds were irrigated. A 
rotary pump, of a claimed capacity of fifty-five gallons per minute 
at one hundred revolutions, was connected by a three-inch suction 
pipe with the water of the lake, and a two and a half-inch discharge 
pipe was laid from the pump to the strawberry plantation, where it 
connected with a line of wood troughs that served to distribute the 
water to the different rows. The pump was operated by a ten horse- 
power threshing engine, though one of half this capacity might 
have done the work, The results of this experiment proved so sat- 
isfactory that it seemed well to describe it in some detail, not that 
the method is new but that the subject is one of great importance to 
the small fruit growers of Wisconsin. 
The ideal ground for irrigation slopes regularly but very gently 
in two directions, though such land is by no means the only kind 
a a a 
Kia. 48.—Showing method of irrigating strawberries. 
