12 THE RURAL LIBRARY. 



are on the highest and lightest part of the farm, and receive fertilizer 

 only at the rate of 500 pounds per acre. 



Unlike Messrs " Williams and Wygant, Mr. Taber makes a great 

 point of securing a heavy green crop for his stra .\ berry ground. To 

 illustrate this we can give this season's history of one bed this year. 

 That bed was plowed on July 21 and thoroughly fined. On August 1 a 

 misture of clover and turnip seed was sown. The amount per acre was 

 one pound of turnip seed, twelve quarts of Medium and four quarts of 

 Alsike clover. At the time of my visit, October 24, the turnips were as 

 large as one's fist, while the clover had made a fine growth. The tur- 

 nips will be sold or used to feed stock, the tops cut off and left on the 

 ground. The clover will be cut twice for hay and then plowed for 

 strawberries again. Mr. Taber is greatly pleased with the success of 

 this experiment, for the crop of turnips will pay all cost of seed and 

 rent of land, besides insuring a first-rate catch of clover. On another 

 part of the field was a heaivy growth of rye, which will be turned under 

 in the spring and the ground set to strawberries, using 400 pounds of 

 fertilizer besides the rye. In fact, you will notice that all these straw- 

 berry growers, while using large quantities of stable manure, also use 

 from a half to a ton per acre of fertilizer, which they call the food of 

 the crop. Mr. Taber says that he cannot use too much of a well- 

 balanced fertilizer on strawberries, though he might use stable manure 

 alone at a loss,'because in order to get enough potash and phosphoric 

 acid for the crop he would be forced to use too much nitrogen. 



Mr. Ta'oer says that there is no doubt that fertilizers give fruits of 

 a better quality than those grown with stable manure. On his soil this 

 difference is also very evident in potatoes. The fertilizers also hasten 

 ripening— this, in fact, is the general opinion of those who have used 

 fertilizers heavily. One good thing about Mr. T.'s farming is that all 

 the fertilizers are distributed by machine. There is no hand work 

 about it. He uses the McKinney distributor, which, with one or two 

 changes which he made himself, will either broadcast the fertilizer or 

 drop it in hill or drill as desired. 



For training his grapes Mr. T. uses a modification of the Kniffin 

 system. The two upper arms alone are left and trained along the 

 upper wire and then down to the lower wire. This gives an umbrella 

 shaped vine, exposing all the fruit to the sun, and giving a better 

 chance for spraying and picking. 



