SMALL FRUITS. 71 



place as a specialist, and then we shall expect good results. It is 

 often asked why it is that there is not more experimental work done 

 on private places, for it seems as if there, without the keen competi- 

 tion of the commercial world, would be the chance for quiet experi- 

 ment and test. 



The experimental work on small fruits as yet does not amount 

 to much, so many of our best varieties are chance seedlings or have 

 been picked up growing in a wild state; and with strawberries, at 

 least, in very few of them can their ancestry be traced back more 

 than three generations. The variety test of fruits by our experi- 

 ment stations really effects only a very small area about the stations, 

 for many of our states are so large that entirely different conditions 

 prevail one hundred miles from the station. Instead of sending 

 out reports from the station's own grounds it would be better to 

 send agents through the state and give reports of the fruit as it is 

 found growing in the different sections of the state. The experi- 

 mental work of the stations should be in the effort to create and 

 establish new varieties of merit, keeping careful records of the crosses 

 by which results were obtained. 



To the commercial grower these small fruits are a source of profit 

 when well handled and there is many a farmer who looks anxiously 

 forward to the success or failure of the strawberry crop; knowing 

 that this will determine the financial results of his year. The gen- 

 eral interest in the use of small fruits dates back about fifty years, 

 hut it is within less than twenty years that this advancement has 

 been most rapid; for while markets were supplied locally fifty years 

 ago the great increase in the use of refrigerator cars has opened up 

 a vast section of fruit growing country in the South and Southwest, 

 and we now have our markets supplied from January to September 

 with these small fruits, beginning with strawberries and ending 

 with blackberries. New England does not grow as many straw- 

 berries now as were grown fifteen years ago. Owing to the low 

 prices which prevailed at that time many people were discouraged 

 from embarking in or proceeding further with this enterprise, al- 

 though there would be a good opening for any surplus crop in New 

 England if it were shipped to southern cities in refrigerator cars, for 

 it is a poor rule that Avont work both ways; and if the southern 

 growers supply us before our berries are ripe why should not we 

 supply them after their berries are gone. 



