akdown of your sawdust. But apparently, it works pretty well. I
think it was Mr. Sam Hemming who suggested using it in the rows. Most of
our State Forests and Waters nurseries in their seedling beds, plant
their seedlings, including chestnuts, make a mixture of sawdust and
sand, about one of sawdust and two of sand, and then broadcast that
right over their seeds. The seeds are broadcast on the firm soil, then
this mixture of sawdust and sand is broadcast over the seeds. That gives
a uniform planting of your seeds and gives a very nice protection. There
is one place that I think sawdust works very nicely.

Straw mulch, any material of that kind, in breaking down takes nitrogen
from the soil. They are all good if you balance that loss of nitrogen
that is lost during the period of breakdown. Now, there comes a time, if
you put a mulch on the soil and let it stay there for six or eight years
and keep building it up, when you pass imperceptibly from straw into
soil, and when you reach that time, your breakdown of your straw is
usually done without taking nitrogen from your soil itself, and from
that time on you may release nitrogen. But until you get that
imperceptible transformation from straw to soil, there is a time when
the breakdown of the straw uses your nitrogen, which is all right, if
it's late in the season, but not early. I'd want to watch my trees and
get my nitrogen on early, then let the straw use it later on.

A MEMBER: The migration of nitrogen--is there some such migration, and
is it just in the case of the sawdust?

DR. ANTHONY: You put it right on top, it's much worse. You can put it
right on top and it will take a year or two to pass through that period
where the utilization in the breaking down of the straw is greater than
the release of nitrogen. If it's mixed in the soil, the tree gets more
of it.

MR. STOKE: How deep is that effect on the soil?

DR. ANTHONY: We have used straw, hay, weeds, sawdust, chips, anything of
the kind, putting on a 5 to 6-inch layer. As I say, it takes from one to
three years to get through that period.

Now, Massachusetts has the longest continuous use--all of New England
has--of mulch, and they are reaching a point now where some of the
mulches are ten years old where the release of nitrogen is too much and
they get poor color on McIntosh. I think with the Chinese chestnut this
is one thing we have got to watch to get good maturity. Going farther
and farther south, you