Page:How and what to grow in a kitchen garden of one acre (IA howwhattogrowin00darl).pdf/171

 and no runners. In growing the plants in this way the runners should not be allowed to form a row more than one and a half feet wide, as this will be fully two feet in the second season, and as much as a picker can manage. The grass particularly should be kept out of the rows of young plants, or it will take a start in the spring and entirely crowd out the strawberries.

These rows should be set out every spring, taking the plants from the outside of the rows planted the preceding year, as it is almost impossible to keep them free from weeds after the first season, besides which they do not bear more than half so many, nor nearly such large berries, the second season. Unless the ground is very rich where the young plants are set, it is a good plan to sow a heavy coat of phosphate, bone, or, best of all, wood ashes, just before they are worked with the cultivator for the first time in the spring. The young plants should not be planted in land that has just been in sod, as it is full of white grubs, which will cat the plants off underground, and care should also be taken that the manure for the strawberry plot is not infested with them. These rows should be lightly covered with long manure, old hay or other litter, in the fall, after the ground has become frozen hard, so that they may be protected from rapid freezing and thawing; and if the covering is not too heavy, it can be left on in the spring and the plants will shoot up through it, leaving it as a mulch and serving to keep the berries clean, by saving them from contact with the ground,