I found Mr. Lister a great stickler for fertilizer, and though he said he had not yet been able to carry out his plans fully, he recommended the following as a sure process to attain the highest degree of success in raising the berries: Five hundred pounds of acid phosphate and cottonseed meal, equal parts, to begin with. Later, in October, side dress them with 500 pounds equal parts acid phosphate, cottonseed meal and kainit. Top dress in February with 400 pounds fertilizer, one-eighth per cent. potash, seven per cent. acid phosphate and five per cent. nitrate soda. After they are one year old about 500 pounds under them in fall, and so applying about three dressings a year, every four months apart, of about 400 pounds, for feeding the plants and building the foundation for the berries.
“I induced one of them ... to stop his team in front of a car of berries, that I might take them, whip and all.”
Mr. Lister thinks that the land may be bought cleared, fenced, fertilized, planted and cultivated ready to pick for sixty dollars per acre. The following are some of the companies I found engaged for a hundred miles down the line of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad. I was unable to get all of them: Bolling Stock Company, Bolling, Ala., about $20,000, eighty acres in berries, eighty in peaches and tomatoes in car lots; Garland Company, Garland, Ala., forty acres; Dunham Stock Company, Dunham, Ala., sixty acres, radishes in car lots; Brown Shepard Fruit Co. and Gravella Fruit Co., Owassa, about 215 acres in berries and peaches; Evergreen, Ala., about 100 in berries and 300 in peaches; Sparta, Ala., forty acres in berries; Marble, Ala., 350 acres in berries and 100 acres in peaches, and so on, as enumerated above. In some places I have found that they were planting the berries between the rows of peaches, and, they tell me, with good results. Mr. W. D. Brown, of Gravella, told me of eight acres of berries which netted their owner $1,800. I was impressed by the fact that the entire business was in its infancy, so far as gauging the possible demands of the future or in establishing the line of fruit and berries for which the land was adapted. As time goes on they will doubtless find that the land will be found suitable for both cantaloupes and watermelons and fruits of all kinds, including figs and grapes. In the matter of grapes alone, I happen to know that in a similar section in Butler County, Ala., a light, sandy land, with good clay subsoil, the finest of Scuppernong grape arbors flourished, some of them covering a half-acre of ground, from which the best of home-made wines are brewed.
Throughout all that section of the South, the land itself is good for all farm purposes, differing, more or less, in different sections, but all capable of holding the fertilizer used and returning good crops of cotton, corn, oats, sugar cane, peas and other legumes. I doubt if better cotton lands may be found in the South than in the pine flat section of Alabama. On all of these lands wild grasses and clover grow in abundance, and I find the cost of growing stock reduced to a minimum.
Strawberries and fruits are the poetry of it—the prose is there, too, and awaits only the hand of the practical, steady, industrious man to make as good a yield of good things all under the fairest skies and in a climate as healthful and amid people as hospitable as may be found in all the world.
The History of the Hals
PART X.—THE FIRST TOM HAL
By John Trotwood Moore