78^ 



more or less wild sending out quantities of. runners whicli! 

 root thickly all over the ground : often, in free plant making, 

 varieties, as many as 100 plants will be set to the square 

 foot or over 4,000,000 to acre. When picking time comes- 

 there is a great rush for pickers to go over this large area 

 and gather the small and poorly shaped berries that have- 

 been produced on these half grown plants. This fruit is. 

 then carelessly packed, rushed to market and sold so that 

 the grower probably realizes a profit of $100.00 per acre. 

 How much betler would it be if we would follow the ex- 

 ample of some of the New Jersey growers and after select- 

 ing an acre of the best land that we have fertilize it very 

 highly and set on this acre 30,000 or even 40,000 plants 

 making the beds four feet wide and! setting the plants one- 

 foot apart each way, leaving a space two feet wide between 

 the beds. You have the same number of plants on this 

 acre that you have on the five acres referred to but in a 

 more compact form, the setting has cost no more, neither 

 have the plants, the fertilizer has not cost as much nor the 

 application of it, so the only item that we have now to con- 

 sider is the labor. Of course we cannot use a horse as 

 much proportionately in this acre as in the five, the only 

 place practical for horse labor being between the beds. 



Most of the work must be done by hand but this wilt 

 take no longer than the slight hand work done on the five 

 acres and it can be done more thoroughly. All runners 

 must be removed from these plants for the object in this 

 method of growing strawberries is to get large, well-de- 

 veloped crowns that ought to produce one quart of berries; 

 each. Think of 30,000 or 40,000 quarts of strawberries to* 

 the acre and place these figures against your five acres 

 of very ordinary fruit. Even at only five cents a quart 

 the acre will produce from $1,500, to $2,000 while it would 

 be difficult to get 20,000 quarts from the five acres. The 

 average profit from an acre of strawberries in Massachu- 

 setts is not over $100. This average is taken from a series of 

 five years so it will be seen that we are not getting what we 

 ought to from our land in strawberries growing under the 

 present system. 



I said that I Avould not quote figures but I am going 

 to depart a little from this and' give you an outline of the 

 cost and profits comparatively betweeni an acre cultivated', 

 intensively and one extensively.. 



