Every spring the fields which have just produced plants are plowed at the close of our shipping season and put through our crop rotation process. This thoroughly renovates the soil and supplies in proper proportions nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, the essential elements of plant food together with an abundance of humus, the medium through which plants feed. It is what might be termed a regenerative process because it actually renews or rebuilds the soil.
It is impossible to find any plants on the Kellogg farm more than one year old except in our testing and experimental beds, and the mother plants in our propagating fields. In digging plants for shipment all mother plants are thrown out. Only their offspring,—strong, sturdy, young runner plants, are used in filling orders. This assures Kellogg customers young blood, full of life and stamina. When such plants are set in the customer’s field or garden, growth is rapid and vigorous.
Kellogg Pedigree runner plant pruned and ready for packing. Vigorous, heavily rooted one-year-old plants of this type are responsible for the universal success of Kellogg customers.
Answering an Appeal for Moisture “When Nature Refuses”
During periods of drouth, our Skinner Irrigation System is relied upon as crop insurance. It’s value is not limited to furnishing moisture to Kellogg Pedigree Plants alone for it is just as frequently used in supplying moisture to our rotation crops.
Like the good Samaritan of Sacred History, it brings water from the nearby stream and applies it soothingly to the thirsty plants in the form of gentle, mist-like, refreshing rain which thoroughly saturates the ground to their very root tips. If drouth prevails at seeding time, its near-natural-rainfall insures prompt germination of seed which is necessary to a successful crop. It likewise is depended upon to furnish an uninterrupted supply of moisture ‘whenever Nature refuses’. Often it is the only means of saving the crop.
This system enables us to furnish Kellogg Pedigree Plants with moisture throughout the growing season, insuring unhampered and unchecked development both of plant and root systems.
With this dependable substitute for natural rainfall, the intense and prolonged drouth of 1921 (the most serious in many years) was not the serious matter with us which it otherwise would have been.
There is also another way in which our Skinner Irrigation System serves our customers, for it gives us an increased production of thousands of plants per acre. As the size of our plant crop bears a direct relation to the prices of Kellogg Pedigree Plants, you can readily see that this increased production is an important factor in enabling us to quote the low prices given on [Page 66] of this book.