ur
soils and especially the vegetable crops.

The next question is--"Are the black peat or muck soils first class? Do
they need anything besides drainage?" Some of them, a very few, produce
really good crops when they are drained, plowed and brought under
ordinary cultivation without fertilization, but only a few. Nearly all
of them need commercial fertilizer, and until a bog covered with peat
soil has been carefully examined to ascertain the depth of the peat, the
difficulty of drainage, and the character of the peat (because peats
differ greatly within a few miles of each other) it is unwise to attempt
to reclaim it. Within three miles of the experiment station we have
three bogs very different in character. One, about half a mile from the
buildings, is heavily charged with lime. Another has an exceedingly
small quantity of lime so that profitable crop production of any kind
would be out of the question without a heavy application of ground
limestone or quicklime. Still another one stands between these two. One
of them can be reclaimed without any great expense, but with the one it
would be a very expensive matter to fertilize and treat with lime after
it had been drained.

Those are the questions that have been given me. Are there any other
questions?

Mr. McCall: What is peat lacking in?

Mr. Alway: Practically all peats are lacking in potash. If the peat
layer be very shallow, six inches, twelve inches, sometimes even
twenty-four inches, the plants are able to get their roots down through
the peat and get their potash from the underlying clay or loam. In that
case no fertilizer is needed. Some of the peats lack lime, some of them
lack lime, potash and phosphoric acid, and some these three and nitrogen
also, so that you either have to apply some commercial form of nitrogen
or grow legumes as green manures.

Mr. Kellogg: What was the trouble where I couldn't raise strawberries on
new wood soil?

Mr. Alway: I couldn't answer that.

Mr. Kellogg: The leaf mold was six or eight inches deep.

Mr. Alway: Was it any deeper than that?

Mr. Kellogg: I don't know, it may have been down a foot, and the leaf
mold had been accumulating there for ages.

Mr. Alway: In some cases the peat is so thoroughly decayed that it looks
like leaf mold and it may be a foot or two feet deep.

Mr. Kellogg: This was no peat, it was just wood soil. I could not raise
anything--

Mr. Alway: Did the plants grow?

Mr. Kellogg: Yes, t