544 



FIELD NOTES. 



abundant and cheap, strawberries, nice fresh fruit in 

 good condition, selling as low as five cents a quart. 

 This year, in a bearing orchard of 700 trees there are 

 not enough apples for our own family. —Robert E. 

 B.MLEY, Mo. 



CANADIAN METHODS 



Actual profits are largest when other people's crops 

 fail and your own are good. This combination is rare, but 

 its occurrence ensures an extraordinary acreage of 

 plants set by your neighbors for miles around. 



Strawberries require land that is very heavily ma- 

 nured, and they seem to effectually exhaust the soil for 

 future strawberry-growing. They require good cultiva- 

 tion and many weedings, but the sum total of the labor 

 is not greater than that involved by the occasional fights 

 that the slipshod grower has to encounter. Those who 

 possess suitable mellow soil, and attend to their small- 

 fruits during all the months of spring, summer and 

 autumn, will usually succeed in growing strawberries ; 

 those who cannot do this should leave them alone. 



Wilson and Crescent have been leading berries here, 

 but just now I have only one favorite — the Bubach. It 



yields, for a considerable time, good pickings of large, 

 rather handsome, irregularly-shaped berries, sweeter 

 than those of most varieties and moderately firm. 

 Plants of this variety are strong and multiply rapidly, 

 and the foliage is unusually fine. Warfield is much like 

 the Crescent in quality, and the berries are larger and 

 more easily hulled. Col. Cheny, Seth Boyden, New 

 Dominion, Early Canada, Atlantic, Great' American, 

 Monarch-of-the-West, Cumberland Triumph, May 

 King, Jessie, Charles Downing, Manchester, Bidwell, 

 Belmont, James Vick, Kentucky, Glendale, and many 

 others I have tried and discarded. A large, regular, 

 bright-colored, firm, sweet strawberry, abundantly pro- 

 duced by vigorous plants, is what we are longing for, but 

 it is very long in coming 



With some fruit-growers, the mowing-machine is a 

 favorite weeding implement. Many general farmers 

 have read of the marvelous profits of strawberry-grow- 

 ing, and mix the business with haying or general farm- 

 work. As may be supposed, it usually profits them 

 nothing, but they succeed in preventing other straw- 

 berry-growers from miking a profit, — E. Morden. 



FIELD NOTES 



AMONG ONIONS AND SMALL FRUITS. 



|ESTERDAY (July 7) I hoed my trans- 

 planted onions, which were set out 

 from June 6 to 12. The seed was 

 sown before the middle of April in 

 flats in the greenhouse, but I could 

 not get the plants to grow as they 

 should, partly because I did not get 

 the soil rich enough and partly because of the cloudy, 

 backward weather. 



We had rain all through May, and the ground was so 

 sodden and other belated work so pressing, that I put off 

 transplanting until the date given. I had doubts about 

 the advisibility of planting so late, but happened to 

 meet W. J. Green, of the Experiment Station, and he 

 advised putting them out, so I transplanted 6,500, and 

 there are not more than 30 missing in the whole lot. The 

 ease with which onions can be transplanted surprises me ; 

 plants accidentally dropped on the ground took root as 

 easily as purslane, growing where they fell. I supposed 

 that it was necessary to be very particular about not set- 

 ting the plants too deep, but Mr. Green tells me it is not 

 necessary to be so particular, and that he has a man who 

 plants 8,000 or g,ooo per day. I could only sort from the 

 flats and transplant 2, 500 a day. I stretched a garden- 

 line, and made a mark with a sharpened stick, but I have 

 a friend who marks with a wheat-drill, removing every 

 other hoe. This makes the rows about 16 inches apart, 

 which is the distance I planted the onions, setting them 

 three inches apart in the rows. The ground was a strip 

 reserved on one side of the peas, and we cultivated it 

 every time we cultivated the peas, so we killed several 

 crops of young "'eeds, and there was very little weed- 



seed left to germinate. Nearly a month afterward only 

 a very few had started, and it was light work to hoe and 

 weed a row 14 rods long in 20 minntes. 



I did not gain anything in time, for a neighbor who 

 sowed in the open ground has larger onions than mine, 

 but he has had to do a great deal more hoeing and weed- 

 ing than I, and his stand is not uniform. The labor of 

 weeding and thinning is much greater than that of trans- 

 planting. 



Next year I shall sow onion-seed by February 12, in 

 very rich earth, and hurry up the plants so as to trans- 

 plant them about May i. There is one thing necessary 

 in early transplanting that must be carefully attended to, 

 and that is hardening off. A good many think that be- 

 cause the onion is hardy it can be moved directly from 

 the warm hotbed to the open field. This is a mistake. 

 All stuff grown under glass is tender when first taken 

 from its protection, and must be gradually inured to the 

 outdoor temperature. My wide awake friend at the 

 Ohio Experiment Station had some onions frost-bitten 

 from insufficient hardening, and a gardener friend who 

 grows thousands of early cabbages lost heavily from the 

 same cause. He had built a new plant-house, and it not 

 being so easy to ventilate as a hotbed, he failed to get 

 them hardened as much as formerly. 



To-day we had our last dish of Kentucky strawber- 

 ries, though we finished marketing all kinds July i. 

 Gandy berries, next latest to Kentucky, were about gone 

 at that date. The strawberry season was not very sat- 

 isfactory, either in price or quantity, and the quality 

 was little better than rain-water stained with strawberry- 

 juice. More than 40 days of nearly continuous rain 



