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.