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Page 46
While more strawberries are planted in spring than at any other
time, certain advantages are secured by summer and fall setting.
This is especially true of gardens wherein early crops are
maturing, leaving the ground vacant. For instance, there are areas
from which early peas, beans, or potatoes have been gathered.
Suppose such a plot is ready for something else in July or August,
the earlier the better. Unless the ground is very dry, a bed can
be prepared as has been described. If the soil is in good
condition, rich and deep, it can be dug thoroughly, and the plants
set out at once in the cool of the evening, or just before a
shower. During the hot season a great advantage is secured if the
plants are set immediately after the ground is prepared, and while
the surface is still moist. It is unfortunate if ground is made
ready and then permitted to dry out before planting takes place,
for watering, no matter how thorough, has not so good an influence
in starting new growth as the natural moisture of the soil. It
would be better, therefore, to dig the ground late in the
afternoon, and set out the plants the same evening. Watering,
however, should never be dispensed with during warm weather,
unless there is a certainty of rain; and even then it does no
harm.
Suppose one wishes to set a new bed in July. If he has
strawberries growing on his place, his course would be to let some
of his favorite varieties make new runners as early as possible.
These should be well-rooted young plants by the middle of the
month. After the new ground is prepared, these can be taken up,
with a ball of earth attached to their roots, and carried
carefully to their new starting-place. If they are removed so
gently as not to shake off the earth from the roots, they will not
know that they have been moved, but continue to thrive without
wilting a leaf. If such transplanting is done immediately after a
soaking rain, the soil will cling to the roots so tenaciously as
to ensure a transfer that will not cause any check of growth. But
it is not necessary to wait for rain. At five in the afternoon
soak with water the ground in which the young plants are standing,
and by six o'clock you can take up the plants with their roots
incased in clinging earth, just as successfully as after a rain.
Plants thus transferred, and watered after being set out, will not
wilt, although the thermometer is in the nineties the following
day. If young plants are scarce, take up the strongest and best-
rooted ones, and leave the runner attached; set out such plants
with their balls of earth four feet apart in the row, and with a
lump of earth fasten down the runners along the line. Within a
month these runners will fill up the new rows as closely as
desirable. Then all propagation in the new bed should be checked,
and the plants compelled to develop for fruiting in the coming
season. In this latitude a plant thus transferred in July or
August will bear a very good crop the following June, and the
berries will probably be larger than in the following years. This
tendency to produce very large fruit is characteristic of young
plants set out in summer. It thus may be seen that plants set in
spring can not produce a good crop of fruit under about fourteen
months, while others, set in summer, will yield in nine or ten
months. I have set out many acres in summer and early autumn with
the most satisfactory results. Thereafter the plants were treated
in precisely the same manner as those set in spring.
If the plants must be bought and transported from a distance
during hot weather, I should not advise the purchase of any except
those grown in pots. Nurserymen have made us familiar with pot-
grown plants, for we fill our flowerbeds with them. In like manner
strawberry plants are grown and sold. Little pots, three inches
across at the top, are sunk in the earth along a strawberry row,
and the runners so fastened down that they take root in these
pots. In about two weeks the young plant will fill a pot with
roots. It may then be severed from the parent, and transported
almost any distance, like a verbena. Usually the ball of earth and
roots is separated from the pot, and is then wrapped in paper
before being packed in the shallow box employed for shipping
purposes. A nurseryman once distributed in a summer throughout the
country a hundred thousand plants of one variety grown in this
manner. The earth encasing the roots sustained the plants during
transportation and after setting sufficiently to prevent any loss
worth mentioning. This method of the plant-grower can easily be
employed on the Home Acre. Pots filled with earth may be sunk
along the strawberry rows in the garden, the runners made to root
in them, and from them transferred to any part of the garden
wherein we propose to make a new bed. It is only a neater and more
certain way of removing young plants with a ball of earth from the
open bed.
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