ABC OF STRAWBERRY CULTURE. 219 



THE STRAWBERRY INDUSTRY NEAR NORFOLK, VA. 



From Gleanings in Bee Culture \ June 75, 1899. 



These truckers have a sort of rotation in garden stuff. For 

 instance, potatoes are grown mostly between strawberries, < r, 

 rather, strawberries are grown mostly between potatoes. Tte 

 rows of potatoes are five feet apart in this case, and a row of 

 strawberries is put between every two rows of potatoes ; and, 

 j udging from appearance, they are set in about as soon as the 

 potatoes come up. The small-footed mules pull their light cul- 

 tivators between the rows, only 30 inches apart, without any 

 trouble. I believe they are rather better than horses, because 

 they rarely or never step on the plants. After the potatoes are 

 marketed, then the strawberries have the whole of the ground. 

 To give you some idea of the strawberry business at Norfolk, I 

 make the following extract from a letter irom friend Stebbins : 



Saturday afternoon, at the back of one of our steamboat wharves I count- 

 ed 17 sail-boats unloading strawberries at once, while others were in sight 

 coming in to unload, and still others going out unloaded. At the front was 

 a string of teams a quarter of a mile long, waiting their turn to unload. 

 Three teams could unload at once, and I don't think it took more than 

 five or six minutes to the three teams. In going a mile I counted 15 more 

 teams coming in, all loaded with berries ; that was at half-past three, and 

 that sort of thing would keep up until six or half-past. Now, that is only 

 one of half a dozen lines in town at the same business. You could smell 

 strawberries for half a mile. JOHN W. STEBBINS. 



Broad Creek, Va., May 15. 



At the time I arrived, the strawberry -gathering had come 

 to a sudden stop, not because the berries were #, mind you, 

 but because the price had dropped to a point where it did not 

 pay to pick them. In Norfolk they pay two cents a quart to 

 the pickers. Then they have to furnish crates and boxes ; and 

 at the price offered, only three cents, it did not pay for harvest- 

 ing. So the owners of the fields, even while the rows were red 

 with berries, gave out to the country all around that whoever 

 chose, colored or white, could come and pick, without money 

 and without price, all they wished. We found colored people 

 scattered all over the fields, picking ; others walking into town 

 with crates of berries on their heads. They went through the 

 town offering them at the houses for only three cents a quart. 

 As the berries cost them nothing, they did perhaps very well at 

 the work ; but it seemed to me to be rather discouraging busi- 

 ness for the grower. 



In some places we found the pickers scrambling out of th e 



