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, the plants grew and wintered well but didn’t bear worth a cent.

Mr. Alway:  Did they make lots of runners?

Mr. Kellogg:  Oh, fairly good, but right over the fence in the next field that had been worked for twenty-five years I got 260 bushels of strawberries to the acre; never had any manure on it.

Mr. Alway:  The more leaf mold the more nitrogen; if you have too much nitrogen it may develop the vine and fail to form fruit or seed.

Mr. Ludlow:  On heavy black prairie soil, three feet deep, where I am growing eighty bushels of corn to the acre, I want to put in strawberries, and I have a lot of wood ashes, dry wood ashes, not leached ashes, but dry wood ashes.  Would it be worth while to put that on or would that overdo the thing?  Would it be policy to put that on?

Mr. Alway:  It is not likely to do any harm, and it is likely to do some good.  Wood ashes contain chiefly lime and potash.  The potash will be a distinct benefit.  The lime isn’t of any particular benefit to this crop on most soils.  For strawberries it is slightly harmful on our ordinary soils that are originally well supplied with lime.

Mr. Ludlow:  On another piece a ways from that I put out a young orchard, and in order to start the trees well I had covered the ground half an inch deep with wood ashes around those trees.  I noticed that the weeds grew there twice as quick as they did when I got away from the wood ashes.

Mr. Alway:  There you have the benefit of the potash and the lime.  If you put lime in the orchards it will make the clover and most of the other green manure crops grow better, and thus you gain in nitrogen from the lime; you gain in potash as it comes from the wood ashes.