144 MODERN STRAWBERRY GROWING 



planted. Whether your soil be heavy or 

 light, trench it two spades deep, turning in a 

 liberal quantity of manure. When trench- 

 ing, always remove a pit large enough to 

 give you plenty of room to work, and then 

 throw the topsoil to the bottom of the fin- 

 ished bed, distributing your manure as 

 evenly as possible during the digging. Use 

 a wagonload of manure to every lOO square 

 feet of bed on extremely light soil, reducing 

 for heavier soils. Virgin soil of good texture 

 would require only about half this amount. 



When ordering your plants be particularly 

 careful to get them from a reliable source; if 

 the soil has been shaken from the roots by 

 the time the plant reaches you, it is not worth 

 planting, for it has suffered a check and will 

 not bear satisfactorily the following season. 



If you already have a strawberry bed you 

 can raise your own plants each season by 

 simply potting up the first runners that ap- 

 pear and setting them in a coldframe where 

 they can be shaded for a few days and care- 

 fully watered. For shading use frames made 

 of cheesecloth, which can also be used for 

 protecting seeds and seedlings, to prevent 

 lettuce from going to seed, etc. When the 



