THE STRAWBERRY 



A MONTHLY MAGAZINE DEVOTED TO THE INTERESTS 

 OF STRAWBERRY PRODUCTION IN ALL ITS BRANCHES 



Volume II No. 5 



Three Rivers, Mich., May, 1907 



$1.00 a Year 



STRETCHING from the James River in Virginia down 

 to the keys of Florida and westerly and northerly to 

 middle Texas and away up into Missouri, is a section 

 that has come to be known as "Uncle Sam's Strawberry 

 Patch," because within that area are grown many millions of 

 dollars worth of the luscious fruit each year for the benefit of 

 the people who live at the North as well as for local consump- 

 tion. One writer refers to the patch that extends along the 

 Atlantic seaboard as being as long as the railroads that occupy 

 the long stretch from Virginia to the Gulf; and it is not a large 

 exaggeration of the actual facts. And what is true of that por- 

 tion of the South is rapidly coming to be equally true of 

 the interior states of the South. 



From the extreme South strawberries have come 

 North practically all winter, but May finds extraor- 

 dinary activity all over the great field, and thou 

 sands of pickers are at work and thousands of 

 others are engaged in the work 

 of transporting and selling its 

 rich products. How fine is 

 much of the product of this 

 great region — a verit- 

 able empire of fruit — 

 may be judged from 

 the illustration that 

 adorns our cover this 

 month. It is a pyramid 

 of Gandys grown by O. O. 

 Ellison of Lawrenceburg, 

 Tenn., and we can hardly blame 

 him as we look at them, for the words 



of praise he speaks of a section whose soil and climate produces 

 such fine specimens of fruit. How much is due to the intelli- 

 gent care and cultivation Mr. Ellison's plants have received at 

 his hands, the reader is left to judge for himself. That they are 

 of primary importance every successful grower very well knows. 

 In his letter to us Mr. Ellison says: 



"The photograph I am sending you is of fruit of my own 

 growing. The variety is the well-known Gandy. The size and 

 quality is attributable to the soil and climatic conditions existing 

 here. We are over 1,200 feet above sea level and the universal 

 cool nights resulting tend to mature all fruit very slowly, which 

 gives size, flavor and carrying qualities. E. D. Caward received 

 the gold medal award at the St. Louis World's Fair on the 

 strawberries he grew here, especial mention being made of the 

 flavor. All things considered, I think this the best fruit section 

 in the country. 



"Last season I had six acres in bearing from which I picked 

 and shipped 742 crates (twenty-four quart). Part of these were 

 of the Klondike variety. I consider the Gandy the best berry 

 to grow here for profit. I received from $2.25 to $3.00 per crate 



for entire crop. The acreage here was decreased last season, 

 many going into cantaloupe growing, which, notwithstanding 

 the extreme wet season proved, as a rule, a very paying crop. 



"The cultivation of the strawberry followed in any climate 

 will apply here. Mine were set the latter part of February two 

 years ago. I used two hundred pounds high-grade fertilizer and 

 two hundred pounds bone meal per acre the first year, following 

 the succeeding year with one-half the amount. 



It is a great satisfaction to receive from a practical grower, 

 as Mr. Ellison has proved himself to be, such a clear statement 

 of the methods employed to produce such results. 



What Mr. Ellison says of a decreased acreage in his sec- 

 tion is true also of other sections of the South. This 

 has been due to several causes. One of them is the 

 fact that the growth of the business has been so 

 -^ rapid that the railway companies and the re- 

 frigerator-car companies could not keep pace 

 with its rapid march. The result was that 

 thousands of carloads of ripe ber- 

 ries have been left to rot 

 ^ in the South because 



"3::^ they could not find 

 transportation 

 facilities to take 

 them North. 

 Naturally, grow- 

 ers could not stand 

 the losses thus en- 

 tailed, and although 

 the transportation compa- 

 ^^ ^"^ nies were compelled to pay 

 ^ ■' hundreds of thousands of dollars, this did 

 not reimburse the growers for their time and trouble, and 

 they gave up the business. But even a more powerful factor to 

 discourage growers in the South has been the difficulty exper- 

 ienced in securing pickers — a difficulty by no means confined to 

 the South. And still another, which is equally universal, has 

 been the unwise haste of some growers who, without proper 

 preparatory training in the production and marketing of fruit, 

 set out large acreage, and even when they succeeded in raising a 

 good crop, failed to market them to advantage. 



However, these are, we trurt, but phases incidental to any 

 rapidly expanding line of enterprise. Certainly, with the huge 

 and growing demand for the strawberry in every city in the 

 United States, and a growing demand, also, for the extension of 

 the time when the strawberry may be available, we shall see this 

 work so systematized that strawberries shall be produced by 

 hundreds of thousands of acres, both North and South, and so 

 economically handled and so perfectly distributed among the 

 markets as to make the production of strawberries on a commer- 

 cial scale a permanent and highly profitable industry. Indeed, 



