DIKECTIONS FOE BLUEBERRY CULTURE. 
13 
drought, although the soil outside the root ball contains plenty of 
moisture. 
An early autumn field planting has furnished a remarkably suc- 
cessful means of avoiding this trouble with potted plants. At this 
season the excessive heat of summer is over, the plants are in full 
and vigorous leaf, and, being taken from pots, carry their whole root 
system with them. The formation of new roots begins at once and 
proceeds with great activity until the leaves are shed, at the approach 
of winter. In the spring, when new leaf growth begins, the plants 
are already well rooted in the soil. They pass through the early hot 
period without injury and develop remarkable size and vigor by 
autumn. 
In preparing for a field plantation one precaution of special im- 
portance must not be overlooked. For the production of a crop of 
fruit under field conditions, insects are required to carry pollen 
from one flower to another. The honeybee works little on blueberry 
flowers. Her tongue is so short that she can not easily reach the 
nectar. The flowers are pollinated chiefly by bumblebees, whose 
tongues are long, and by some of the solitary wild bees that are 
small enough to crawl through the narrow opening of the corolla. 
When blueberry flowers are pollinated with pollen from their own 
bush the berries are fewer, smaller, and later in maturing than when 
the pollen comes from another bush. Some bushes are almost com- 
pletely sterile to their own pollen. (See PI. XIIL) The pollen of a 
plant grown from a cutting is likewise unsatisfactory for the polli- 
nation of the parent plant or of other plants grown from cuttings 
of it. It is important, therefore, that a plantation should not be 
made up wholly from cuttings from one bush. Two stocks should be 
used, a row of plants from one stock being followed by a row from 
the other. 
In the permanent field plantation the bushes should be set 8 feet 
apart each way. T\nien thej reach mature size they will nearly or 
quite cover the intervening spaces. 
When blueberry culture is to be tried in a sandy or gravelly soil 
deficient in peat or peatlike matter, the plants should be set in sepa- 
rate holes or trenches about 12 inches deep in a mixture of two to 
four parts of peat or half -rotted oak leaves to one part of clean sand. 
The excavations should be wide enough to provide ample space for 
new growth of the roots, not less than a foot each way from the old 
root ball. In small plantings, if the materials for the mixture are 
easily available in quantity, an 8-inch bed of it may be laid down 
over the whole surface of the ground, and if a planting is to be tried 
on a soil wholly unsuited to the blueberry, the area may first be cov- 
ered with a 6-inch layer of sand, the bed of peat and sand mixture 
being then laid down on top of the sand layer. Wherever used, the 
peat and sand mixture should be thoroughly manipulated, so as to 
