190 GARDENING WITH BRAINS 1^ 



left unpicked — except those we selected for our 

 table. Now, to jump from Portland, Oregon, 

 to Portland, Maine, or thereabouts, we were 

 paying for strawberries, in 1920, forty cents a 

 quart. That's just twenty times as much as 

 was paid twenty years ago; consequently twenty 

 years hence strawberries will be twenty times 

 forty cents, or eight dollars a quart — any 

 schoolboy could figure that out. 



If, at present prices, more than twenty-five 

 million dollars' worth of strawberries are sold in 

 the United States every year, twenty years hence, 

 at eight dollars a quart — But let us drop 

 arithmetic, it isn't popular — boys usually make 

 a bonfire of their mathematical school books. 



It is interesting to know that Americans eat 

 half of all the strawberries marketed in the 

 world (when we like a thing we do like it, 

 *'sure") and that New York is the greatest 

 market for this berry in the world. It was so, 

 for that matter, as long ago as 1849, when the 

 Erie Railroad alone brought into the city 

 (population, 300,000) no fewer than eighty thou- 

 sand baskets in one day. Yet a century ago, in 

 the year 1820, a few wagon loads of Hackensack 

 berries, brought across the Hudson in sailing 

 sloops twice a week, when wind and tide per- 

 mitted, constituted New York's entire supply, 

 as F. H. Hexamer informs us; and — listen! — a 

 period of three weeks comprised the limits of the 

 strawberry season! 



