100 SUCCESS WITH SMALL FRUITS. 



and accurate. The crop you wish to raise has constituents 

 in certain proportions. Supply these, they say, and you 

 have the chemical compound, or crop. A field or garden, 

 however, is not a sheet of blank paper, but a combination 

 at which nature has been at work, and left full of obscuri- 

 ties. The results which the agricultural chemist predicted 

 so confidently do not always follow, as they ought. Nature 

 is often ver}- indifferent to learned authorities. 



There is yet another class — a large one, too — who re- 

 gard these fertilizers as they do the drugs of an apothecary. 

 They occasionally give their land a dose of them as they 

 take medicine themselves, when indisposed or imagining 

 themselves so. In either case there is almost entire igno- 

 rance of the nature of the compound or of definite reasons 

 for its usefulness. Both the man and the field were " run 

 down," and some one said that this, that, or the other thing 

 was good. Therefore it was tried. Such hap-hazard action is 

 certainly not the surest method of securing health or fertility. 



In no other department of horticulture is there more 

 room for common- sense, accurate knowledge, skill, and 

 good management, than in the use of all kinds of fertili- 

 zers, and, in my judgment, close and continued observation 

 is worth volumes of theory. The proper enrichment of the 

 soil is the very corner-stone of success, and more fail at this 

 point than at any other. While I do not believe that accu- 

 rate and complete directions for the treatment of every soil 

 can be written, it is undoubtedly tme that certain correct 

 principles can be laid down, and information, suggestion, 

 and records of experience given which will be very useful. 

 With such data to start with, the intelligent cultivator can 

 work out the problem of success in the peculiar conditions 

 of his own farm or garden. 



It must be trae that land designed for strawberries re- 



