A B C OF STRAWBERRY GUI/TURK. 41 



When the plants come to bloom, examine them and seethe 

 difference between the perfect and imperfect flowers. I would 

 advise that you set out another bed in the spring, prepared as 

 before, with large nice plants from your own bed. Do not take 

 any of the old original plants, with their black roots. I think 

 it better, take it all around, to set out a new bed each year than 

 to try to clean out the old one. You have then the best of 

 plants to set out, of your own growing. If you keep a bed two 

 or more years, the plants then would not be such as I would 

 set out. You should always have plants that have never borne 

 fruit, grown from plants that also produced none.* Again, 

 enemies are becoming abundant in strawberry-beds, and the 

 longer we leave them the greater chance they have. Also, 

 treated as I have advised, you will get the largest crop and fin- 

 est berries the first season you pick a bed. 



You may not know how to take up plants. I use a four- 

 tined potato-fork, sticking it down by the side of a few plants 

 as you would to dig a hill of potatoes ; then lift up the plants, 

 dirt and all, and shake them on the fork until most of the dirt 

 is off. If it is very dry weather, on heavy soil it pays to water 

 heavily, the night before, the plants you wish to take up. If 

 you have no potato-fork you might take up a few with a spade. 

 Many growers use the old-fashioned potato-hooks that used to 

 be used for digging potatoes. After shaking the plants clean, 

 cut the roots off at the bottom, leaving four inches on the 



* I fear the above sentence will not be understood and acted on unless 

 I put a little more emphasis on it. It is very exhaustive work for straw- 

 berry-plants to bear a big crop of fruit. After the fruit season is over the 

 plant withers up, gets rusty, and for quite a time looks almost dead. Now, 

 if you pick all the blossoms off so the plant can not bear any fruit it is 

 spared from this exhaustive process. It keeps its leaves bright and green, 

 and it sends out strong and thrifty runners much earlier than it would 

 have done had it borne a crop of fruit. Therefore, to get the be&t plants 

 you must secure them from parent plants that have never been allowed to 

 bear. Set apart a portion of your bed, or, better still, have a nursery for 

 growing plants where the parent plants have plenty of room, say none of 

 them nearer than a foot, and where they are not allowed to bear a single 

 berry. This should be extra-strong ground : then you will have strong 

 bright young thrifty plants, ready to put out either in the spring or in the 

 fall, and plants that will " get right down to business." A. I. R. 



