212 THE CONNECTICUT POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



I would respectfully recommend that it is a good plan to 

 even rake up leaves, if you can. Do any of these things, and 

 they will help you to get a mulch to protect your fruit. For 

 instance, if strawberries and raspberries and currants are on 

 a rather late soil, they should have a cover crop. You can 

 secure a crop that will serve as a cover crop, and have a 

 very good mulch for your strawberries or currants. You 

 can do that by sowing oats. Sow these oats early enough 

 so that they will come up to a joint anyway. They will 

 waste very much easier, fall down, and make a splendid 

 mulch. That is the only fault I ever found with them. Some- 

 times this crop will fail, but otherwise they do make a splen- 

 did mulch, if you can get body enough. 



In the cultivation of fruit, the exposure or slope of the 

 land is an important thing to consider. We should be all the 

 more careful not to select a wrong exposure for the plants. 

 Let us study that a little. I know that a great many people here 

 come from a locality where you have the trailing arbutus. 

 You never see that growing in a sun-shiny, exposed place, 

 where the bright rays of the sun shine in on it and warm it 

 up. I know of a place in Michigan where there is a little 

 creek running along. Where this creek runs in a north and 

 south direction the sun strikes in on the eastern slope. I go 

 along through the little valley and take a sharp turn around 

 here, and not five rods from this point, where there is not a 

 bit of sun, I have often found a bountiful supply of arbutus. 

 Now what was the reason of that? Apparently, the soil was 

 the same, but the conditions were different. It was the ex- 

 posure. When the Excelsior strawberry first came out, I 

 had a neighbor in Michigan who had some warm sandy 

 land. He said to me, "I am going to have the first straw- 

 berries of that variety in this locality. I am going to put 

 them in a particular spot, where there is a southern ex- 

 posure, and where they will have the bright sun. The plants 

 made a splendid growth. In the fall he went out and mulched 

 these with coarse horse manure. The next spring the berries 



