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tage of plowing wet top soil. It is equally disadvantageous to blast a wet subsoil. Of course, some subsoils are always in a more or less damp condition and never get thoroughly dried out, but they may be safely and advantageously blasted when they are in their dryest condition. Water-logged soil should never be blasted except for the purpose of ditching it or tiling it so as to get it into a proper condition for blasting. The ditching may be done economically and quickly with dynamite, and in many cases this will answer just as well as the more expensive tiling. When the ditching or tiling has drained this subsoil, it may then be safely blasted. _Filling the Pot-Holes_: In any heavy soil the explosion of the dynamite tends to form a cavity in the immediate vicinity of the cartridge, varying from one to two feet in diameter. The heavier or the wetter the subsoil, the larger this cavity is likely to be. After the blast the top soil should be shoveled out and laid to one side; next shovel out the subsoil and lay it on the other side of the hole; continue this excavation until the pot-hole is reached, then be careful to fill this hole reasonably tight with subsoil, the object being to prevent the possibility of soil falling away from the roots of a tree after planting, and leaving it suspended in the air. This is the cause of the death of trees planted in dynamited holes which some unsuccessful experimenters report. It takes a little time to fill this pot-hole, but the many advantages of planting trees properly in dynamited holes more than offset this extra time and trouble required to properly prepare the hole. _Planting the Trees_: After the pot-hole has been filled, continue to shovel in subsoil until the proper height is reached for planting the tree, then throw in half the top soil and spread the roots on that in their natural positions, then throw in the remainder of the top soil, next get in the hole and walk around the tree several times, tramping the top soil down tight around the roots so as to remove all large air spaces that surround the roots, then fill the hole to the surface with subsoil. Planting a tree in this way costs a few cents more per tree than the old way, but since the tree can only be planted once and the comparative records as to loss of trees the first year after planting, show an average advantage of 30 per cent. in favor of dynamited trees, namely, the loss is cut down from three to
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