130 Strawberry-Growing 



was due, in part, to the remarkable productiveness of 

 the Crescent, a pistillate variety, which grasped the lead- 

 ership relinquished by the Wilson. Between 1880 and 

 1900, a large number of growers, having such heavy yield- 

 ing pistillates as Warfield, Bubach, Haverland and Green- 

 ville before them, believed that pistillate sorts are, and 

 must be, more productive than staminate. In 1890 W. J. 

 Green sent a list of leading varieties of both sexes to 

 prominent strawberry-growers, requesting that the pro- 

 ductiveness of each variety be marked on a scale of 

 10. The summary of the replies gave an average of 

 5.8 for the staminate, and 8 for the pistillate.^ In 

 1912 the Ohio Experiment Station reported : ^ " The 

 average yield from each eighteen-foot row of perfect 

 varieties (139 varieties) was 5.47 quarts, and from each 

 row of the same length of imperfect varieties (66 varie- 

 ties) was 7.19 quarts. There are some high-yielding 

 perfect flowered varieties, and some among the imper- 

 fect that give low yields ; but it is generally recognized 

 as a fact that the former, as a class, are less prolific than 

 the latter." 



Probably this conclusion is correct, as applied to all 

 varieties; but when applied to individual varieties it is 

 without weight. Outside of experiment stations, few 

 persons grow more than five or six varieties. Since a 

 considerable number of staminate varieties are fully as 

 productive as the most prolific pistillate sorts, the fact 

 that pistillate varieties, as a class, are more productive 

 than staminate varieties, as a class, is of academic inter- 

 est only. For all practical purposes, staminate and pis- 

 tillate varieties are equally prolific. 



1 Bui. Ohio Exp. Sta.,Wol. Ill, No. 7 (1890), p. 22. 

 »Ibid., Bui. 236 (1912). 



