STATIC POMOLOGTCAL SOCIETY. 35 



let it go. If you are going- to have good big strawberries you 

 have got to go right down in your pocketbook and lose six, eight 

 or nine months interest on your money. If you raise these great 

 strawberries they will be sold before they are picked. By the 

 use of the Richards' transplanter system it is not necessary to set 

 early in the spring but it may be done after early potatoes and 

 early, sweet corn. I have dug up plants with the transplanter 

 and set them out between rows of early sweet corn, then when 

 the sweet corn is picked the plants are well started. Some of you 

 have perhaps tried potted plants but I doubt if you have had 

 much success with them. To plant as I have described is much 

 better. You can get larger plants and better plants. We do not 

 care to have our plants in the rows develop more than two run- 

 ners each. Some people think that they ought to have twenty, 

 but we would rather develop two or three very large ones. You 

 will be surprised to see how quick the runners will take hold 

 and grow. The result is that by' September we have a row of 

 individual plants right straight across the field. It is not a 

 matted row but a row of single big plants side by side. 



We never want these rows very wide, for you should be able 

 to run your cultivator close up to the plant. Pay no attention 

 if your hired man comes to tell you that he don't think you had 

 better cultivate them any longer because you will hurt the roots, 

 you can't do it, the roots don't get out where they will be hurt. 



We plant a grape vine here and a raspberry there and a black- 

 berry over there and four or five feet away on the other side of 

 a stone wall you bury a dog or a dead cat or a bone or any other 

 fertilizer and what will follow? You give it time and you will 

 find that the roots almost instinctively have turned to the wall and 

 gone right over to the dog or cat or bone. I have seen the roots 

 of a grape vme simply eat creases in a bone ! The roots of the 

 plant have run in the soil to where the bone or cat are buried. 

 That is not the way with the strawberry plant. It was never 

 intended to be a long, wide reaching plant. It was designed ta 

 grow within a peck measure or a bushel basket. These things 

 I believe must be fully understood in order to produce fine fla- 

 vored firm strawberries. 



Many strawberry growers secure good plants, and take good 

 care of them but yet they do not raise these fine big berries. In 



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