GROWING RASPBERRIES 



Mr. N. H. Whitcomb, Littleton, 



Mr. President and Members of the Association, I have 

 been attending these meetings of the Association for sev- 

 eral years with a good deal of profit and pleasure, but since 

 answering your persuasive Secretary in the affirmative, I 

 think I can sympathize with the aggrieved husband at the 

 funeral of his wife when he was informed by the undertaker 

 that he would be obliged to ride to the grave in the same 

 carriage with his mother-in-law. He replied, with a sigh, "I 

 can, if it is necessary, but I assure you, you are taking away 

 all the pleasure of the occasion." And it is certainly true 

 that it is embarrassing to a man that has spent more than 30 

 years mostly behind the cultivator, you might say in the 

 bushes, to stand before an audience like this after listening 

 to the verj^ able addresses and papers you have listened to, 

 and try to tell you even his humble experience. 



I will simply tell you what I have done, not how to do 

 it, because anyone here who is interested in the subject knoAvs 

 what to do a good deal better than I. You might think I 

 would be well qualified to speak about this, having grown 

 them so long , but they have always been grown on the same 

 farm, on one of our New^ England hills with mainly a south- 

 eastern slope. They also extended over the hill, and on the 

 other side, so that part of the slope has been a northwest- 

 erly slope. The soil of that hill is typical, I think, of our 

 New England soils. The surface soil is a medium dark loam, 

 with cobbles of varying size. We have had those to contend 

 with, and it seemed in the first few years we were growing 

 more cobbles than plants, because we no sooner got of¥ one 

 crop and plowed and cultivated, then- we got a bigger one 

 than before; but in a few vears we overcame that. Below 



