Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel

by Samuel W. Johnson

These soils are easy to work, are ready for the plow early in the spring, and if well manured give fair crops in wet seasons. In a dry summer, however, they yield poorly, or fail of crops entirely; and, at the best, they require constant and very heavy manuring to keep them in heart.

Crops fail on these soils from two causes, viz.; want of moisture and want of food. Cultivated plants demand as an indispensable condition of their growth and perfection, to be supplied with water in certain quantities, which differ with different crops. Buckwheat will flourish best on dry soils, while cranberries and rice grow in swamps.

Our ordinary cereal, root, forage and garden crops require a medium degree of moisture, and with us it is in all cases desirable that the soil be equally protected from excess of water and from drouth. Soils must be thus situated either naturally, or as the result of improvement, before any steadily good results can be obtained in their cultivation. The remedy for excess of water in too heavy soils, is thorough drainage. It is expensive, but effectual. It makes the earth more porous, opens and maintains channels, through which the surplus water speedily runs off, and permits the roots of crops to go down to a considerable depth.

What, let us consider, is the means of obviating the defects of soils that are naturally too porous, from which the water runs off too readily, and whose crops "burn up" in dry seasons?

In wet summers, these light soils, as we have remarked, are quite productive if well manured. It is then plain that if we could add anything to them which would retain the moisture of dews and rains in spite of the summer-heats, our crops would be uniformly fair, provided the supply of manure were kept up.

But why is it that light soils, need more manure than loamy or heavy lands? We answer—because, in the first place the rains which quickly descend through the open soil, wash down out of the reach of vegetation the soluble fertilizing matters, especially the nitrates, for which the soil has no retentive power; and in the second place, from the porosity of the soil, the air has too great access, so that the vegetable and animal matters of manures decay too rapidly, their volatile portions, ammonia and carbonic acid, escape into the atmosphere, and are in measure lost to the crops. From these combined causes we find that a heavy dressing of well-rotted stable manure, almost if not entirely, disappears from such soils in one season, so that another year the field requires a renewed application; while on loamy soils the same amount of manure would have lasted several years, and produced each year a better effect.

We want then to amend light soils by incorporating with them something that prevents the rains from leaching through them too rapidly, and also that renders them less open to the air, or absorbs and retains for the use of crops the volatile products of the decay of manures.

For these purposes, vegetable matter of some sort is the best and almost the only amendment that can be economically employed. In many cases a good peat or muck is the best form of this material, that lies at the farmer's command.

I.—Its absorbent power for liquid water is well known to every farmer who has thrown it up in a pile to season for use. It holds the water like a sponge, and, according to its greater or less porosity, will retain from 50 to 100 or more per cent. of its weight of liquid, without dripping. Nor can this water escape from it rapidly. It dries almost as slowly as clay, and a heap of it that has been exposed to sun and wind for a whole summer, though it has of course lost much water, is still distinctly wet to the eye and the feel a little below the surface.

Its absorbent power for vapor of water is so great that more than once it has happened in Germany, that barns or close sheds filled with partially dried peat, such as is used for fuel, have been burst by the swelling of the peat in damp weather, occasioned by the absorption of moisture from the air. This power is further shown by the fact that when peat has been kept all summer long in a warm room, thinly spread out to the air, and has become like dry snuff to the feel, it still contains from 8 to 30 per cent. (average 15 per cent.) of water. To dry a peat thoroughly, it requires to be exposed for some time to the temperature of boiling water. It is thus plain, as experience has repeatedly demonstrated, that no ordinary summer heats can dry up a soil which has had a good dressing of this material, for on the one hand, it soaks up and holds the rains that fall upon it, and on the other, it absorbs the vapor of water out of the atmosphere whenever it is moist, as at night and in cloudy weather.