6 ABC OF STRAWBERRY CULTURE. 



with a little patch. This was my practice for some seventeen 

 years. I could raise $20.00 worth extra of potatoes, which were 

 right in my line, and make a fine profit on them, and with the 

 money buy what strawberries we wanted, of a small-fruit 

 grower near by, who made a business of berry-growing, while, 

 had I grown the $20.00 worth of strawberries myself, it would 

 probably have been at a loss, and would have been an extra 

 matter to worry over and bother with. Now, I thought at the 

 time that this was sound business policy, and, for that matter, 

 I still think so ; but I am just as well satisfied that it will not 

 work. I preached it because I had tried it, and thought it the 

 best way, where one is already overrun with business. But 

 many of our farmers seem to have bet n born with the feeling 

 that they must not pay out any money for any thing they can 

 possibly get along without. The writer was not born on the 

 farm, and it was just as easy for him to buy five bushels of 

 strawberries as a barrel of salt or a set of chairs, or any thing 

 else that we did not produce. He really had no idea that it 

 made so much difference what one's bringing up had been. 

 But he has been around among farmers a good deal of late, and 

 has learned his mistake. I remember once going home with a 

 well-to-do farmer who had many acres of land to manage, and 

 considerable money invested in outside business. He showed 

 me, among other things, a large bed of strawberries. Now, I 

 knew that this friend was close to a market where he could 

 buy fine home-grown berries at fair prices, and I was rather 

 surprised that a man with so much business on his hands 

 should be bothering to grow his own strawberries. So I said to 

 him : "You grow these, of course for the pleasure of it, and 

 not because it pays you to fuss with such little matters when 

 you have so large a farm and so much other business to attend 

 to?" 



"No; I raise them," he replied, "because I should not 

 have them if I did not. I tried your plan, and we did not have, 

 I presume, more than a peck of berries during the season, 



