A B C OF STRAWBERRY GUI/TURK. 191 



on, the dirt, if wet enough, will hold around the plant so it can 

 be handled. The nicest way, in my opinion, is to grow your 

 plants in a plant-bed made up of exceedingly rich compost ; 

 then you carry enough of this compost out to the field to give 

 your plants a big start, even if the ground is comparatively 

 poor. We have not yet tried shipping plants by express, taken 

 up in this way ; but by breaking off a part of the ball of earth, 

 so as to decrease the weight as much as possible, and yet have 

 enough left to keep the roots perfectly, then packing these balls 

 of earth with sphagnum moss, I think valuable plants could be 

 sent this way with profit. The weight of the adhering soil 

 would, of course, be a serious objection to sending any plants 

 in this way unless it were a small number of something exceed- 

 ingly valuable. Sometimes it seems desirable to swap places 

 with certain valuable plants. With the above machine this can 

 be done in a twinkling ; and even the plants that have been 

 transplanted do not seem to know they have been swapped. 

 The machine has a cylinder 3 inches in diameter and 5 inches 

 in length. The whole thing amounts to the same thing as our 

 transplanting tubes ; but you have no tin tubes at all to pick 

 up and put away. The machine itself does the whole business. 



Perhaps I should explain that cylinder No. 1 is made of 

 the very best crucible steel ; and while in use it is as bright as 

 a polished saw-blade. 



It has now been tested by many competent men, and there 

 is but one verdict in regard to it it is away ahead of any other 

 transplanting-arrangement of the kind that has ever been 

 brought before the public. 



The little plant you see in the picture is a basswocd- seed- 

 ling. One day when one of our small boys was put of a job I 

 told him to mark out one of our plant-beds with one of our 

 markers, then pick up the basswocd- seedlings all over the gar- 

 den, wherever he could find them, and put them in the bed. 

 No. 2 shows one of the basswood-seedlings just as we picked 

 them up. In a little while he had a bed of 300 nice ones. Acd 

 this reminds me that we have pretty much failed in getting 

 basswoods to grow where we planted seeds ; but wherever we 

 are making up beds near the basswood-trees, these little seed- 

 lings come up plentifully. Under one small basswocd-tree we 

 picked out over forty plants. 



I may add that, since 1897, we have manufactured and sold 

 a large number of these machines, and they have now come to 



