Mr. Brackett:  Have you ever found any ground with too much leaf mold on it to grow good strawberries?

Mr. Alway:  I have not.

Mr. Brackett:  I remember when I broke out my place where I am living now I had a place where the leaves had collected and rotted until I would say there was eight or ten inches of leaf mold.  When you went across it you would sink in almost to your shoe tops.  On that piece of ground I grew 11,000 quarts of strawberries to the acre in a year, the largest yield I had ever grown on that leaf mold.  You can never get too much leaf mold.  There must have been something else besides the leaf mold.

Mr. Alway:  In case a crop does not give a satisfactory yield it may be due to other things than the soil, and until we eliminate the other possible causes we can’t safely blame it to the soil.

Mr. Moyer:  What do those black soils in the western part of the state need?  They have a whitish deposit on top.

Mr. Alway:  Drainage.  That is alkali.

Mr. Kochendorfer:  I have a ten-year apple orchard that I disked last year and kept it tolerably clean this spring.  There were a lot of dandelions sprung up that I mowed down the middle of July, and since then they have grown up again.  Will they take nitrogen the same as clover?

Mr. Alway:  They won’t take any from the air.  They will act like so much rye, but when they die and decay nitrogen will be gathered from the air and added to the soil by bacteria that live upon the decaying vegetable matter.

Mr. Kellogg:  Did you ever hear of them dying?

Mr. Alway:  Dandelions?  If they are plowed under.

A Member:  Is it practicable to grow soy beans in this soil?  Can they be gotten at a reasonable price, and can we mature them here?

Mr. Alway:  They mature here without any serious difficulty.  There are a great many different varieties.  If you order them from a distant seed house you may get a variety that will mature in Louisiana but not in Minnesota.

A Member:  How about cowpeas?

Mr. Alway:  Cowpeas are disappointing thus far north.  In Minnesota they are not nearly as satisfactory as the soy bean.  In an unusually warm summer they are satisfactory.

A Member:  With the soy bean do you have to plow in the whole of it?

Mr. Alway:  Yes.  The whole plant ought to be plowed under.

A Member:  Would it be practicable to feed soy beans in an orchard?

Mr. Alway:  Yes.  You don’t get quite the same benefit from the green manure when you pasture as when you plow under.

A Member:  How about the hairy vetch?  Does it grow here?

Mr. Alway:  Yes.  It grows here.  It is not a bad crop at all.

* * * * *

POISONING TREE SCALE.—­We take the following from Scientific
American as worth consideration by the owners of orchards and lawns: