Pleasant Talk About Fruits, Flowers and Farming

by Henry Ward Beecher

“Every flower contains both the male and female organs; and, in the white and monthly, both organs are always perfect in the same blossom, as far as my experience goes. In other kinds, the male organs are more or less defective in one set of plants, and the female in the other; and, in the Hudson and some other varieties, it amounts to a complete separation of the sexes. The male organs are so defective in one set of plants, and the female in the other, that an acre of either would not produce a single fruit. In some of the male (staminate) varieties, more or less of the blossoms are also more or less perfect in the female organs, and will produce more or less fruit; but I have never seen a female plant with the male organs sufficiently developed to produce a single perfect fruit. Hovey’s seedling, and some others, may produce deformed berries.”—Longworth.

Mr. Longworth, in consequence of this fact, always has a compartment allotted to male and one to female plants, and out of these he forms his beds, being able thus to insure a proper proportion of males to females. Mr. S. S. Jackson, a very skillful nurseryman of Cincinnati, usually, in selling plants, puts up ninety females to ten males in the hundred.

We shall now give the time and manner of planting of some of the best cultivators in the West, at the East, and in England.

Mr. Jackson says: “I plant any time from the first of April, till they are in bloom. I, one year, planted twenty-five square roods of ground; the plants were all in bloom when set out; and the next year I picked thirty-eight bushels, and there were fully ten bushels left on the vines.

“I plant them in this way: first plow or spade the ground; harrow it smooth; then strain a line on one side nine inches from the edge, and a row from twelve to fifteen

inches apart; then move the line eighteen inches, and plant another row; then move it three feet, and again eighteen inches—and so on till the ground is planted. I then go over and put one male plant every six feet, between the two rows. Keep them clear of weeds through the summer, and let them spread as much as they will.

“In the fall dress the out-walks eighteen inches wide, which will leave the beds three feet wide; and when it sets in cold, give them a light covering of straw; rake it off in the spring. You may then expect a full crop. It is best to make a new bed once in two or three years.”

But plantations may be made through the summer, and as late as September; of course, the earlier in the season the better established the plants will become before winter, and the larger the next summer’s crop. Thus, a bed formed in September would bear very scantily; while Mr. Jackson’s beds, formed in the spring, produced a large crop the next season.

Mr. Kenrick gives the following methods as practised by market gardeners near Boston; the first one strikes us as being the most economical way of working strawberries, on a large scale, that we have seen:

“In the vicinity of Boston, the following mode is often adopted. The vines are usually transplanted in August. The rows are formed from eighteen inches to two feet asunder. The runners, during the first year, are destroyed. In the second year, they are suffered to grow and fill the interval, and in the autumn of that year, the whole old rows are turned under with the spade, and the rows are thus shifted to the middle of the space. The same process is repeated every second year.