If fruit is the main object, after the plants are well located and begin to set fruit for your main crop, they can be mulched with clean straw or hay, carefully tucked up around each hill.  This will keep the fruit clean and conserve the moisture in the soil, and you can stop cultivating.  If plants are the main object, then you can not use the mulching, but must keep the cultivator going between the rows.  Well informed growers of the strawberry plant generally have beds on purpose for fruit in one place, and in another place one to grow plants.

No one will make a success in growing strawberries unless he can learn to detect the rogues that appear from time to time in strawberry patches or in the fields.  These rogues are generally plants that have come up from the seed that has been scattered in one way and another over the bed.  Berries are stepped on and mashed, other berries are overlooked and rot on the ground, but the seed remain and germinate when the time comes for it in the spring, and some of these plants are not destroyed by cultivation or by hoeing, and soon make trouble for the grower.  No seedling will be like the original plants that were first set, and many of them will be strong growing plants, good runners but worthless for fruit.  When you set a new lot of plants you get some of these seedlings, and that is how the mixture comes in.  I have counted one hundred and fifty seedling plants around one old plant in the spring.  Of course the most of these where good tillage is practised are destroyed, but some remain in spite of all you can do unless you pay the very closest attention and learn to distinguish rogues from the true named varieties.  All rogues must be kept out if you keep the variety true to name.  Of course once in a while a rogue will prove to be a valuable variety, as was the case when Mr. Cooper found the Pan American eighteen years ago, from which our fall varieties owe their parentage.  If you want to be successful remember to keep in mind the value of constant selection and keeping your parent stock true to name.

When you first set out your plants, go over them and examine them closely and see that everything is right.  Then remember that the first sign of a good fall bearing variety is to see it throw out fruit stalks.  You can cut these off, so that the stub of the fruit stem will show that it has sent up a flower stalk.  You can see the stub.  In this way in a small patch you can easily keep track of them.  If some plants do not throw out fruit stems, mark them so you can tell them, and if they pass the season without trying to fruit, you must refrain from setting out any of the runners that appear, or there is liability of trouble.  Let such plants alone for another year’s trial.  Then if they do no better, dig them up and destroy them.  Once in a while they prove to be all right, but often they are worthless.