Peat is most easily cut in a vertical direction, but when, as often happens, it is made up of layers, the sods are likely to break apart where these join. Horizontal cutting is therefore best for stratified peat.
Fig. 3.—IRISH SLANE.
System employed in East Friesland.—In raising peat, great waste both of labor and of fuel may easily occur as the result of random and unsystematic methods of working. For this reason, the mode of cutting peat, followed in the extensive moors of East Friesland, is worthy of particular description. There, the business is pursued systematically on a plan, which, it is claimed, long experience[17] has developed to such perfection that the utmost economy of time and labor is attained. The cost of producing marketable peat in East Friesland in 1860, was one silver groschen=about 2-½ cents, per hundred weight; while at that time, in Bavaria, the hundred weight cost three times as much when fit for market; and this, notwithstanding living and labor are much cheaper in the latter country.
The method to be described, presupposes that the workmen are not hindered by water, which, in most cases, can be easily removed from the high-moors of the region. The peat is worked in long stretches of 10 feet in width, and 100 to 1000 paces in length: each stretch or plot is excavated at once to a considerable depth and to its full width. Each successive year the excavation is widened by 10 feet, its length remaining the same. Sometimes, unusual demand leads to more rapid working; but the width of 10 feet is adhered to for each cutting, and, on account of the labor of carrying the peats, it is preferred to extend the length rather than the width.
Assuming that the peat bed has been opened by a previous cutting, to the depth of 5-½ feet, and the surface muck and light peat, 1-½ feet thick, have been thrown into the excavation of the year before—a new plot is worked by five men as follows.
One man, the "Bunker," removes from the surface, about two inches of peat, disintegrated by the winter's frost, throwing it into last year's ditch.
Following him, come two "Diggers," of whom one stands on the surface of the peat, and with a heavy, long handled tool, cuts out the sides and end of the blocks, which are about seventeen by five inches; while the other stands in the ditch, and by horizontal thrusts of a light, sharp spade, removes the sods, each of five and a half inches thickness, and places them on a small board near by. Each block of peat has the dimensions of one fourth of a cubic foot, and weighs about 13 pounds. Two good workmen will raise 25 such peats, or 6-¼ cubic feet, per minute.
A fourth man, the "Loader," puts the sods upon a wheel-barrow, always two rows of six each, one upon the other, and—
A fifth, the "Wheeler," removes the load to the drying ground, and with some help from the Bunker, disposes them flatwise in rows of 16 sods wide, which run at right angles to the ditch, and, beginning at a little more than 10 feet from the latter, extend 50 feet.