The strawberry is an exceedingly profitable crop if properly handled, and is one of the best small fruits for people with little capital.  While the price in the general market varies from fifteen to thirty cents per quart, they sometimes run as high as fifty in the early spring; yet it is possible to grow strawberries worth six dollars a quart by intensive culture in greenhouses.  Mr. S. W. Fletcher, in Country Life in America, says:  “The forcing of strawberries is a specialized industry of the highest type.  Everybody cannot make it pay everywhere....  Strawberries are forced in pots or in benches.  The pot method is preferred by those who find a demand for the highest quality of fruit regardless of expense....  If fruit is desired for Christmas, the plants are not checked to any extent, but are kept in continuous growth.  The conditions of springtime are simulated as far as possible.  At Christmas time a quart box of forced Marshall strawberries sells at from one-fifty to eight dollars per quart, averaging about four dollars.”

Our most valuable allies against the insect armies are toads, bats, wasps, dragon flies, and birds; they enjoy the battle.

There cannot be too many toads or bats.  Toads will eat all sorts of flies, potato bugs, squash bugs, rose bugs, caterpillars, and almost anything that crawls.

If the wasps become a nuisance, it is easy to poison them; but the birds are often a nuisance—­the robins eat the strawberries and cherries the instant they are ripe.  They soon get used to scarecrows; and to cover the fruit with nets gives the insects a free hand.  Some growers raise sweet cherries or other fruits specially to feed up the birds so that they will let the rest alone.  Early rising and a plenty of cats is about the best remedy.  A man, or even a woman, working on the land is the best scarecrow.

There are a few other fruits that grow wild in certain sections and are gathered and sent to market.  Among these the cranberry is the most important.  It grows in nearly inaccessible bogs, principally in New Jersey, and the usual custom is for owners of land on which there are cranberry bogs to let out the bog to pickers on a percentage basis.  Cranberries can be cultivated, and there is a considerable profit in the business.  The swampy nature of the ground needed, however, will deter all except the most persistent from this industry.  Some cranberry bogs bring as high as a thousand dollars an acre.

The blueberry or huckleberry, or, as we call it in Ireland, the bilberry, or frohen, grows wild in the northerly states, and is much sought after in the market.  Many efforts have been made to grow the blueberry commercially; but, as is well said by Mr. J. H. Hale in the Rural New Yorker, “The blueberry proved to be a good deal like Indians—­it would not stand civilization, and was never satisfactory, although I monkeyed with it for a period of about ten years.”  Mr. Fred W. Card, of Rhode Island, in the same issue reports a similar experience.  With our present knowledge of the blueberry, it is doubtful if it can be made a commercially cultivated crop.  Lately, however, it is claimed that it can be grown in very poor, non-nitrogenous soil.