marsh can be flooded immediately and be 

 expected to revert to salt marsh. It 

 will not do it! The salinity is too 

 high; it will take a long time for the 

 salt to be leached out. Some experimen- 

 tal work manipulating the soil will be 

 needed. The Army Engineers would like 

 to fill such marshes with dredge spoil. 

 However, there is more than one dredge 

 spoil problem in the San Francisco Bay 

 area. I can show dredge spoil that was 

 laid down in 1952; by 1973 it still was 

 bare soil. It takes a long time before 

 the salts in those soils will leach out 

 and vegetation will grow. 



There is another phase-actually 

 planting dredge spoil. We learned that 

 with time the spoil will consolidate and 

 machinery can be taken in. First, we did 

 everything by hand because we could not 

 use machinery. We prepared a seed bed, 

 fertilized some, and did not fertilize 

 others. We used different kinds of 



fertilizers; and most interesting are 

 the areas showing the best growth 3 yr 

 after fertilization. We have not fer- 

 tilized since then because we did not 

 think it is necessary; the plants are 

 doing fairly well. The first year they 

 did not look very well, but the second 

 year they were growing fairly well, and 

 the third year I was amazed to see the 

 results. Some of the single bud cuttings 

 had 14 or 15 shoots coming up. However, 

 it was very discouraging the first year. 

 The plants stayed alive, but they did 

 not grow much. 



Our best luck was in the lower tid- 

 al areas. We got very good establish- 

 ment beyond the area of the low-low tide 

 and the high-low tide. We got a little 

 established above that but not very con- 

 clusive results. These results alone 

 suggest that we are dealing with a ge- 

 netically different situation with the 

 plants. 



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