32 The Strawberry Book. 
-ner gently into the ground, and laying a small stone or a 
little earth upon it. 
Again, in garden culture, where neat, compact rows are 
desired, it is well to lay in the straggling runners, and press 
their roots into the soil among the parent plants, thus leav- 
ing the space between the rows clear for the use of the hoe. 
Where the cultivator has a bed of a choice variety, and 
wishes to obtain from it every possible plant, he may go 
over his bed late in the season, take out every small, weak 
plant, and every tip of a runner just rooting, and set them 
an inch or two apart in a spent hot-bed. -If there is a little 
heat left in the bed, and the vines are watered and shaded 
a very little, they will all grow, and make fine strong plants 
in a few weeks. 
But the most practicable way of obtaining fine healthy 
plants, that will suffer but little from being transplanted, is 
to layer the runners in small flower-pots i in the-open field. 
The pots, in any convenient number, should be plunged 
to their rims along the rows in July or August, and filled 
with soil. Runners just beginning to root are pressed into 
the soil in the pots without detaching them from their par- 
ent plant, and in a week or two the whole pot will be filled 
with roots. The runners may then be cut off, and the new 
plant transplanted wherever it is needed. Ihave said this 
may be done in July and August, but of course it may be 
done at any time, a week or two before the plants are 
needed. The size of the plant depends upon that of the 
pot. Three and four inch pots are generally employed by 
the propagators of strawberry vines, who have begun of 
late years to offer for sale plants thus layered. In sending 
such plants to their customers, they turn them out of the 
pots to pack them, the numerous fibrous roots holding the 
earth together in a compact ball. 
The value of such plants, especially for early fruiting, is 
very great. They do not suffer at all from transplanting ; 
and vines carefully layered thus in the fall, and removed 
