144 MODERN STRAWBERRY GROWING 
planted. Whether your soil be heavy or 
light, trench it two spades deep, turning in a 
liberal quantity of manure. When trench- 
ing, always remove a pit large enough to 
give you plenty of room to work, and then 
tkrow the topsoil to the bottom of the fin- 
ished bed, distributing your manure as 
evenly as possible during the digging. Use 
a wagonload of manure to every 100 square 
feet of bed on extremely light soil, reducing 
for heavier soils. Virgin soil of good texture 
would require only about half this amount. 
When ordering your plants be particularly 
careful to get them from a reliable source; if 
the soil has been shaken from the roots by 
the time the plant reaches you, it is not worth 
planting, for it has suffered a check and will 
not bear satisfactorily the following season. 
If you already have a strawberry bed you 
can raise your own plants each season by 
simply potting up the first runners that ap- 
pear and setting them in a coldframe where 
they can be shaded for a few days and care- 
fully watered. For shading use frames made 
of cheesecloth, which can also be used for 
protecting seeds and seedlings, to prevent 
lettuce from going to seed, etc. When the 
