A B C OF STRAWBERRY CULTURE. 215 



to have hurried the Rio forward, and did not the others not 

 even the Earliest and Darling. The Rios are great strong thrifty 

 plants, with stout runners already out, besides a very fair 

 crop of fruit it is going to bear. Now, this thing illustrates a 

 point : Under a special system of cultivation the Rio is the ear- 

 liest good-sized berry we know of. And by the way, friends, 

 there is going to be an enormous crop of berries on that little 

 plantation put out last fall. They were all potted plants, how- 

 ever ; or if not potted they were set out with our new strawber- 

 ry-transplanter that I have described and illustrated ; and this 

 experiment demonstrates one thing to my satisfaction : With 

 the right kind of culture you can grow an enormous crop of 

 berries from potted plants in only nine or ten months after they 

 occupy the ground. 



RECOMMENDING NEW VARIETIES OF STRAWBERRIES, ETC. 



From Gleanings in Bee Culture, April i, 1899. 



You may remember that, some little time ago, in visiting 

 Matthew Crawford, he showed me a strawberry of such wonder- 

 ful luxuriance of foliage that, had he told me it was a new va- 

 riety, and very scarce and high priced, I do not know but I 

 would have given him $5 00 for a single plant. But friend 

 Crawford is not that sort of man ; and then he explained to me 

 that the wonderful growth and luxuriance were not altogether 

 on account of the plant, but in the way he prepared the soil in 

 that one bed. It was light sandy soil, made very rich with old 

 stable manure, and then the ground was pounded as hard as he 

 could make it, with a stamper, something like what we use in 

 setting fence posts. I went home and began to experiment on 

 some of our plant-beds that had been manured so heavily so 

 many years that they contained almost too much humus. We 

 have a pounder worked by two men, that we use in making ce- 

 ment floors and similar work. I had two of the boys stamp 

 the dirt in one of our plant-beds as hard as they could pound 

 it. This was along in the fall, when the ground was dry, and 

 would bear such pounding without injury. 



About this time friend Thompson sent me half a dozen 

 Darling strawberry-plants, and I think as many of the Earliest ; 

 also some Carrie. As he called these varieties all valuable I 



