he plants grew and wintered well but didn't bear
worth a cent.

Mr. Alway: Did they make lots of runners?

Mr. Kellogg: Oh, fairly good, but right over the fence in the next field
that had been worked for twenty-five years I got 260 bushels of
strawberries to the acre; never had any manure on it.

Mr. Alway: The more leaf mold the more nitrogen; if you have too much
nitrogen it may develop the vine and fail to form fruit or seed.

Mr. Ludlow: On heavy black prairie soil, three feet deep, where I am
growing eighty bushels of corn to the acre, I want to put in
strawberries, and I have a lot of wood ashes, dry wood ashes, not
leached ashes, but dry wood ashes. Would it be worth while to put that
on or would that overdo the thing? Would it be policy to put that on?

Mr. Alway: It is not likely to do any harm, and it is likely to do some
good. Wood ashes contain chiefly lime and potash. The potash will be a
distinct benefit. The lime isn't of any particular benefit to this crop
on most soils. For strawberries it is slightly harmful on our ordinary
soils that are originally well supplied with lime.

Mr. Ludlow: On another piece a ways from that I put out a young orchard,
and in order to start the trees well I had covered the ground half an
inch deep with wood ashes around those trees. I noticed that the weeds
grew there twice as quick as they did when I got away from the wood
ashes.

Mr. Alway: There you have the benefit of the potash and the lime. If you
put lime in the orchards it will make the clover and most of the other
green manure crops grow better, and thus you gain in nitrogen from the
lime; you gain in potash as it comes from the wood ashes.

Mr. Brackett: Have you ever found any ground with too much leaf mold on
it to grow good strawberries?

Mr. Alway: I have not.

Mr. Brackett: I remember when I broke out my place where I am living now
I had a place where the leaves had collected and rotted until I would
say there was eight or ten inches of leaf mold. When you went across it
you would sink in almost to your shoe tops. On that piece of ground I
grew 11,000 quarts of strawberries to the acre in a year, the largest
yield I had ever grown on that leaf mold. You can never get too much
leaf mold. There must have been something else besides the leaf mold.

Mr. Alway: In case a crop does not give a satisfactory yield it may be
due to other things than the soil, and until we eliminate the other
possible cause