REPORT ON THE KLAMATH MARSH EXPERIMENT. 7 



had been cut with the disk and where heavy irrigation was used the 

 phints, particularly the cereals, made a slightly better growth, but 

 even there the growth was abnormally slow and weak. A critical ex- 

 amination of the plants at the time when the arrested growth had 

 become conspicuous (about the middle of June) showed (hat the 

 roots were confined to the superficial layer, and that in the few cases 

 where they had penetrated much beyond the first 3 inches they 

 were dead and badly corroded. On the nights of June 20 and 21 

 severe frosts occurred, with the result that all of the tender crops 

 were killed to th^ ground and nearly all of the others were severely 

 injured. Immediately after this frost a second planting of the tender 

 crops was made. The crops from the second planting came up 

 promptly, but after having exhausted the food supply stored in the 

 seed these too began to suifer and die, although temperature and 

 moisture conditions were favorable to growth. 



The wheat, oats, barley, alsike, clover, alfalfa, and redtop re- 

 mained alive throughout the season on the disked land, but none of 

 these crops made anything like a normal growth, even under the most 

 favorable conditions it was found possible to provide. A few plants 

 of both sugar beets and blood beets, as w^ell as some of the potatoes, 

 survived the season on the land from which the furrow slice had 

 been removed, this survival occurring chiefly in a few places where 

 excess quantities of irrigation water were used, but even under these 

 conditions growth was abnormallv weak. 



It became apparent from these experiments that thorough leaching 

 of the land would be a necessary preliminary to the production of any 

 of the ordinary crop plants. Indeed, none of the crops in the fore- 

 going list gave any indication of ability to thrive under the condi- 

 tions of the experiment. 



EXPERIMENTS IN LEACHING THE LAND. 



The land planted to crops was irrigated by surface flooding or by 

 furrows. It was found that on the disked but unplowed land the 

 water moved readily through the porous supei-ficial layer to the 

 depth of 4 or 5 inches and drained off into the open ditches on either 

 side, but there was little evidence of any considerable penetration 

 below this laj^er. On the land from which the furrow slice had been 

 removed the water was absorbed so slowly that after heavy flooding 

 it was necessary- to draw off the water from the check after each 

 irrigation, even though the ditches on either side of the flooded 

 tract were kept empty. In other words, the downward and lateral 

 movement of water into the land was so slow as to make very doubt- 

 ful the possibility of reclaiming the land by leaching out the excess 

 of alkaline salts. 



[Clr. 8C] 



