THE RUSHIRE FRUIT FARM, IONIA, MICH. 
5 
spindling runners, literally covering the ground 
with plants. Carefully watch it next season 
and you will find very little fruit on either the 
mother plant or its runners. If the runners 
had been kept off it might have been induced 
to grow a few berries, but never a good crop. 
The point is, we want to know the value of 
these plants for setting out a new bed. Treat 
them as carefully as you may and you will find 
they will continue to make foliage but 
Little Fruit. 
You understand by a good crop I do not 
mean forty to sixty bushels per acre, which is 
the average, but from two to four hundred 
bushels and upwards per acre. 
Occasionally you will find a plant whose ten- 
dency to grow only foliage has been checked and 
has become strengthened seminally and turns 
to the production of fruit buds, and if these 
are skillfully selected and not allowed to over- 
bear, its f ruitfulness may be restored so as to 
bear a medium crop. 
For a Second Test, 
let us take a plant which has never been allowed 
to bear fruit and is literally loaded with the 
largest, finest green fruit. I wish to emphasize 
the words green fruit, for seminal exhaustion 
does not take place until the seed forming 
process begins. Now cut the fruit off and 
throw it away. Give it the same care and cul- 
tivation and it 
Will, Not Die 
as in the first instance, but will with renewed 
vigor throw out large, strong runners, making 
stocky plants, and in the fall you will find the 
crowns a mass of fruit buds ; as already 
■explained, until seminal exhaustion takes place 
the plant will strive to reproduce itself by 
formation of seeds and to do this in the great 
est perfection it must produce magnificent 
fruit. A plant will 
Never Exhaust Itself 
in producing runners because it is a part of its 
foliage. A strawberry runner is in no sense a 
eeed. It is only a bud and a part and parcel of ' 
the original plant. It has the same blood and ' 
carries with it all its constitutional defects and ' 
weaknesses, and if the parent plant has been j 
exhausted by re-production (producing seeds) 
it will now give its energy to producing runners 
and foliage and produce very little fruit. 
To Illustrate Further 
take an apple tree, one of our favorite varieties 
that has been allowed to overbear until nearly 
dead, having been loaded with an immense num- 
ber of very small, gnarly apples year after 
year. Now cut scions from it and graft on strong, 
healthy stock and re-graft a number of times 
as fast as possible from these grafts and see if 
you can produce a tree that will bear equally 
well with one grafted from a tree 
Bearing: Prize Takers 
and in full vigor. I do not believe it can ever 
be done. 
A Further Test. 
It is well known that grape vines it not 
pruned will exhaust themselves in a verj' few- 
years. If left unmolested they will set more 
fruit than they can mature. 
Take two strong plants from vines that 
have never been allowed to overbear. Prune 
one of them closely and allow it to set no fruit 
till say the fourth year and then only three or 
four clusters. After it comes to full bearing 
prune back to twenty or thirty buds and thin 
out any thickly set clusters. The fruit will 
always be rich and high flavored and plenty 
of it. 
Now let the second vine receive the same 
cultivation but no pruning or thinning of fruit. 
Let it bear heavily the second or third year. 
It will soon have broken clusters and poorly 
flavored fruit. After seven or eight years 
commence pruning and see if you can bring it 
up to the vigor and fruitfulness of the first 
vine. You can't do it. If you prop- 
agate from the second vine you can tell 
the difference in fruitfulness from the cuttings 
taken from the first vine as far as you can see 
them. They will not last as long and the fruit 
will be in every way inferior. Try it. 
Did you ever stop to think that after so many 
years of cultivation and multiplication there is 
only 
One Wilson's Albany Plant. 
All the plants now scattered over the world are 
only the buds of the original seedling. The 
same is true of the Baldwin apple, Bartlett 
pear and all other kinds of fruit propagated by 
buds or grafts. 
It Is a Positive Fact 
that many nurserymen are flooding the country 
