Growing Two Crops at Once

By Unknown Author - Naples Record

4 June 1890

The question what to plant for a catch crop is an important one to the fruit grower at any period of his career, but especialy so to the beginner, who is paying out all the time without any possibility of gathering a profitable crop from even the strawberries in less than a year.

To the difficulty of growing two crops at the same time, without injury to either, is added the question of gathering and the problem of profit, as affected by the increased cost of production. The tree fruits give but little trouble, as any hoed crop can be grown, excepting such as require very high manuring, like cabbages and onions.

Of the small fruits strawberries give very little opportunity for growing anything else, although some plant them twenty inches apart in the row and plant a single eye of some dwarf potato, like Early Ohio, between. Onion sets may also be put in, provided it is done early; and on high priced land, near a city, the rows of strawberry plants may be set four or four and a half feet apart, and a row of early cabbages, or onions, or early sweet corn may be grown; but this means a good deal of hard labor that must be hired cheaply if a profit is to be expected.

A correspondent in Vick’s Magazine, authority for the above, once tried the experiment of growing early cabbages between rows of strawberries planted three feet apart. The ground was a long neglected garden spot that had produced a crop of weeds three years in succession. There was no room for horse cultivation, and hand hoeing did not push the cabbages as horse work would have done, and they were only second early, bringing a low price, which did not begin to pay for the extra hand work required. The cabbages, which should have been out of the way by July 15, were not marketed until September 1st, and then the stawberries had in many places run across the row, and the cultivator belied its name and became a destroyer.