WE had never heard or seen an instance where a grower had mulched his blackberries for any length of time until we met a case near New Brunswick, N. J., last June. The proprietor planted an exact acre of Lawton blackberries four years ago, scattered a ton of bone meal over the ground, and then mulched the soil from beginning to end, four inches deep with shavings, salt hay and chopped corn stalks. He has never been troubled with weeds to any great extent, comparatively few suckers have sprung up since in the line of the rows; and he has never bestowed a dollar in cultivation. The result is that he has always realized a large amount of fruit yearly, and it has been uniformly double in size of same kind of fruit grown on land not so mulched. Most of our Southern fruit-growers know that they are liable to have droughts during the blackberry picking season, sometimes only short, at others very severe and prolonged, and cutting short the size of the fruit very materially. The plan of heavy mulching is the only one we have yet seen which will remedy the difficulty. Irrigation is good but costly, unless supplied from a reservoir at a greater height.

Mulching thus accomplishes a double purpose: it doubles the size and market value of the fruit, and saves the labor of cultivation.