CHAPTER I. 



THE BEGINNING. 



" Let your light shine." 



I HOLD that it is right to tell what we know in any 

 line of farming, if our knowledge be of value to 

 others and will help them to success. Now, I 

 have been engaged, more or less, in strawberry culture 

 for over a dozen years, and have in 

 that time learned a little, and this 

 little I am ready to communicate to 

 my neighbors and even to impart to 

 a wider circle, wide enough to take 

 in the whole Farm Journal family 

 and the entire remnant of the popu- 

 lation of the country. 

 The only trouble is I do not know it all ; and yet 

 it may be best that I do not, since I have discovered 

 that those folks who know it all, are apt to get behind 

 the lighthouse and are left in the dark themselves. 



Confessed, I do not know it all ; yet Harriet knows 

 some and Tim knows a heap ; together we are so far 

 from a universal knowing that I have not hesitated, in 

 preparing this book for publication, to call on a large 

 number of bright, experienced, enterprising, fearless, 

 obliging men, to tell what they have learned about 

 berries and how to grow them. Nobly they have 

 responded to my call, and the pages to follow will bear 

 witness to their wit, their knowledge, their liberality, 

 their thoroughness and the kindness and good will that 



