Iht RURAL. NEW-YORKER 
1583 
Manure for Strawberries 
I have some strawberry beds I wish to 
renovate: others already set out from 
potted plants. Stable manure is hard to 
get, but I have chicken and pig manure, 
also a large cesspool to empty. I am close 
to woods, plenty of rotten leaf mold ad¬ 
jacent. Can I utilize all or either to ad¬ 
vantage, now or next Spring? Are wood 
ashes of value? o. w. 
Wantagh. N. Y. 
We would not use the chicken manure 
or cesspool waste this Fall. That would 
cause too much growth before very cold 
weather. Better keep the manure in a 
dry place and in Spring crush it and use 
like fertilizer. Or you can mix the manure 
and leaf mold and .pour the cesspool waste 
over the pile and make a good compost. 
T)o not expect too much from the cesspool 
waste. It is not as rich as many believe. 
Wood ashes are good to supply lime and 
potash. You can mix them with the com¬ 
post. 
would not keep well. The fonnalin will 
have little effect upon the rot. or blight. 
There would be no practical may of ster¬ 
ilizing a large piece of land except by 
thorough setaming as was described on 
page 1400. 
Propagating Raspberries from Root 
Cutting 
T planted a row of sucker raspberry 
plants of this season’s growth about May 
20 last. They made a splendid growth of 
tons. Will the roots of only one season's 
growth be of sufficient s’ze to make root 
cuttings, or should I wait another year? 
Burlington, N. .T. j. l. h. 
All types of raspberries can be suc¬ 
cessfully propagated from root cuttings, 
but this method of propagation is seldom 
used with any but the reds. Roots from 
the size of a small straw and larger may 
be used for this purpose, though as a mat¬ 
ter of course the heavier the roots are the 
better and stronger the plants will be at 
one year old. The root cuttings are made 
in late Fall or early Winter, and are usu¬ 
ally cut in lengths of about two inches. 
These cuttings should be layered in boxes 
of damp sand and carried over Winter in 
a cool cellar. When large quantities are 
handled it is the usual practice to scatter 
them thinly in shallow drills, covering 
them about two inches deep as early in 
Spring as the ground becomes dry enough 
to work, but when only a few hundred or 
thousand are handled, the best and most 
successful way is to start them in a mild 
hotbed and transplant them to the open 
ground as soon as large enough to handle, 
or as early as weather conditions will per¬ 
mit. The hotbed should be made up about 
the middle of February, but the cuttings 
should not be bedded until the temperature 
of the soil drops to below 80 degrees. 
Narrow trenches or drills are opened to a 
depth of two inches, into which the cut¬ 
tings should be placed, about one inch 
apart. They may be layered flat or 
plunged in the ground perpendicularly or 
at a slight incline and covered about two 
inches deep, watered and the sash put on. 
They will need about the same attention 
in all respects as a bed of vegetable 
seeds, until the sprouts break 
ground, when they must be given plenty 
of air on all mild and bright days. A 
good time to plant them in the open 
ground is when the outside plants have 
made a growth of three or four inches. 
The ground should be rich, and the plants 
given clean cultivation. Under these con¬ 
ditions they will usually make good strong 
plants by Fall, many from the heavy roots 
making a growth of two feet or more. K. 
Potato Scab and Rot 
The first potatoes dug in my patch a 
month ago were somewhat scabby; the 
last dug (yesterday) were very scabby. 
Does it grow worse the longer the tubers 
remain in the ground? My son says the 
scab increases on the potatoes after they 
are dug. too. Is that the case? Can I 
treat my potatoes with formalin and stop 
the disease now? Will the tubers be fit 
to eat afterward? There are some signs 
of rot—caused by late blight I think. Will 
formalin kill those spores or germs too? 
M'* "round is evidently filled with germs 
of scab. Will it not be necessary to 
tieat the soil as well as the seed to insure 
clean potatoes next year? F. G. 
New Jersey. 
Yes. the scab disease evidently 
in the tubers in the soil during 
season as we have had this year, 
may be some slight increase among the 
stored potatoes, but not much if they are 
kept dry. Formalin would destroy most 
of the scab germs, and the tubers would be 
fit to eat, but unless the potatoes were 
promptly dried out before storing they 
spreads 
such a 
There 
Notes from a Maryland Garden 
A farmer in this section said to my 
wife recently, “I have been reading Prof. 
Massey’s notes in The R. N.-Y. with in¬ 
terest, but lately he has written so much 
about flowers, in which I take no inter¬ 
est.” Well, there are many farmers who 
pass through life perfectly contented with 
ugliness in their home surroundings, and 
I have always pitied ‘‘the wives and daugh¬ 
ters of such men, for I know that women 
as a rule love pretty things around them, 
and their attempts at floral beauty in 
homes where the head of the family can 
see nothing worth looking at but cotton or 
tobacco, are often very pathetic. The 
woman who loves flowers (and where is 
there one who does not?) will have other 
things fine "and pleasant in the house, even 
to the family food. In traveling around 
the country attending farmers’ institutes, 
and stopping at all sorts of hotels, I have 
been struck with the fact that when we 
came to a country hotel and found flow¬ 
ers about it we were sure of getting good 
and well-prepared meals. 
Years ago I was down in the far south¬ 
western part of North Carolina, in the 
wildest mountain section. We had 
crossed a mountain pass in the night, and 
had landed after midnight at the stage 
hotel in a town on the upper waters of 
the Tennessee River. It was about the 
dirtiest hotel I have ever seen, for the 
bare floor of the bedroom we were con¬ 
signed to was covered with red clay 
kicked off muddy boots, and the husk mat¬ 
tresses felt as though the corncobs were 
still in them. As we were to be there 
two days, three of us determined to look 
for better quarters if we could persuade 
someone to take us in. So. after a very 
unsatisfactory breakfast, we wandered up 
the one long street of the town, and at the 
far end saw a house with a hotel sign 
with a gay flower garden in front. I said 
to my companion : “This is the place, for 
I have never seen it fail that where flow¬ 
ers are loved and cared for there is a 
clean house and good food.” We moved 
up and found the flowers were right, and 
the place was a model of its kind. 
Then on the farm, where everyone in 
the family loves flowers and maintains a 
good show of them about the house, and a 
green expanse of well-made and kept 
lawn. 1 have invariably found a farmer 
devoted to the improvement of his soil 
and in love with his profession—a real 
farmer. 
I ouce had some business with one of 
these men on a farm who did not love 
flowers, and hated grass because he had to 
fight it in his one crop of cotton, just as 
the one-crop cotton farmers have always 
hated grass, while grass would have made 
them more money than cotton in the way 
they grew it. It was a bare house, stand¬ 
ing in a bare field: not a tree nor a shrub 
nor a flower. The cotton rows ran al¬ 
most to the kitchen door. In the kitchen 
the wife was frying some fat meat foj 
dinner for the farmer and his boys out in 
the cotton field. I had seen no live stock 
hut the mules pulling the plows in the 
field, and I knew that that meat came 
from the Western packers. Some farmer 
out West had raised the hog and shipped 
it to Chicago. The railroad got freight 
from it. The packer killed and cured it, 
and certainly did not lose any money. A. 
railroad brought it South and got an¬ 
other freight, and the country merchant 
bought it and sold it to this farmer on 
credit, and of course added a good profit. 
And now that farmer and his sons were 
sweating over their only crop, hoping that 
they could from it help to make all those 
other people rich, while they lived amid 
ugly surroundings and wore out the life 
of the wife and mother with no joy in ex¬ 
istence for her. I then said that if the 
boys raised under such conditions did not 
run off to town and hate the farm they 
were a poor lot. 
I have had men look at my flower gar¬ 
den. evidently thinking that it was a very 
trifling thing for a man to give so much 
attention to. while I understood just what 
they were thinking, and pitied their wife 
and daughters. Even in their devotion 
solely to farm crops for sale they failed 
to understand that beautiful lawns, trees 
and flowers add value to every acre iff a 
farm if it comes to be sold. Take two 
farms of the same size and quality of soil, 
one with well-kept lawn, trees and flow¬ 
ers, and the other a bare house standing 
by the road, and no ornamental features 
around it. and the other farm will sell for 
dollars an acre more, though the land 
may not be worth any more agriculturally. 
It pays to make a place homelike, where 
bdvs and girls are to imbibe their first 
ideas of life. w. f. massev. 
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