Any fool that knows enough can grow strawberries, which reminds me of the preacher in York State who both preached and farmed it.  He was trying to bore a beetle head and could not hold it; a foolish boy came along and said, “Why don’t you put it in the hog trough?” “Well!  Well!” the preacher said.  “You can learn something from most any fool.”  The boy said, “That is just what father says when he hears you preach.”  I don’t expect to tell you much that is new, but I want to emphasize the good things that others have said: 

Soils. I once had twenty-one acres of heavy oak, hickory, crab apple and hazel brush, with one old Indian corn field.  I measured hazel brush twelve feet high, and some of the ground was a perfect network of hazel roots; the leaf mould had accumulated for ages.  The first half acre I planted to turnips, the next spring I started in to make my fortune.  I set out nineteen varieties of the best strawberries away back in the time of the Wilson, than which we have never had its equal.  The plants grew well and wintered well, but they did not bear worth a cent, while just over the fence I had a field on ground that had been worked twenty years without manure that gave me two hundred and sixty bushels to the acre.  It took three years with other crops to reduce that loose soil before I could make strawberries pay.  My fortune all vanished.

Last June while judging your strawberry show, I found a large collection of twenty-five kinds of the poorest strawberries I ever saw, grown on the college grounds.  I visited the field, found over a hundred varieties, well tallied, well cultivated, on new oak opening soil.  First crop, the soil seemed ideal, every thing good except the plants and the fruit.  The foliage was defective and the fruit very poor.  Was it the new soil?

I have always found good garden soil would produce good strawberries; the best beds were those that followed potatoes.  Cut worms and white grubs seldom follow two years of hoed crops.

[Illustration:  Mr. Geo. J. Kellogg ten years ago]

Preparation. Preparation for the best strawberries should be started three years before planting.  Using soil from sand to clay, well drained, well manured, sowed to clover, take off the first cutting of clover, then more manure plowed under deep with the second crop of clover, as late as can before freezing up, to kill insects and make the soil friable and ready for a crop of potatoes the next spring.  After harvesting 300 bushels of potatoes to the acre use a heavy coat of well rotted manure without weed seed, plowed under late in fall.  The following spring, as soon as the ground will work, thoroughly disk and harrow, and harrow twice more.  Then roll or plank it, mark both ways two by four feet, set by hand either with dibble or spade, no machine work.  Crown even with the surface, with best of plants from new beds, leaving on but two leaves, and if the roots are not fresh dug, trim them a little.  Firm them good.