, 
VEGETABLES. 359 
believe it, try draining off the surplus water and sowing redtop or 
timothy seed, either of which will not grow to produce a crop of 
hay good for anything until the bog has had time to settle down 
and rot, which often takes many years. After you get such a bog 
to rot, itis good hay land. A piece of land in condition to produce, 
a good crop of hay will not do to grow cranberries. Mark this well. 
The cranberry, like its near botanical relative, the *blueberry, finds 
its most congenial home in areally poor soil. A failure to note this 
fact has been at the bottom of many an expensive and aggravating 
failure in trying to cultivate cranberries. It is true that many of 
the most successful and profitable cranberry farms in the country 
have been made out of good hay land; but only by rendering it ar- 
tificially poor, especially at the surface, by smothering it with sev- 
eral inches of sand. Where the soil isin condition to grow a good 
crop of redtop or timothy, cranberry vines will either grow too rank 
and produce few or no berries, or else grass will choke them out. 
Neither will they grow in a soil that has any clay init. It must be 
either a pure vegetable mold and sand, i. e.,a black sand, or unde- 
composed peat. It is only in the unrotted peat that we find them 
growing wild, but if properly supplied with water a black sand is 
quite as good, if not better. A very light covering of pure sand on 
a black sand will suffice, whereas, it requires several inches, even as 
much asa foot, sometimes, of pure sand to properly prepare rich 
vegetable mold so as to produce cranberries instead of hay. 
Cranberries must, in all cases, be irrigated, if they are growing in 
land that is not already wet. They must be so situated that they 
can be completely covered with water all winter, and so they can be 
quickly covered at other times to protect them from the ravages of 
certain insects and from late spring, summer and early fall frosts, 
for the best success. 
Neither must there be too much lime in the soil in which they grow 
in which respect they again resemble their relations,the blueberries. 
Neither cranberries nor blueberries thrive in a strongly lime- 
impregnated soil. This may be the key to certain failures in 
cranberry plantations in Wisconsin and other parts of the North- 
west, viz., too much lime in the sand or water used, or too much in 
the soil generally. Lime promotes the growth of grass but is imin- 
ical to the growth of the cranberry, the same as clay. Here we see 
it crops out again, a grass soil is not a cranberry soil. Nowl 
know there are a very great many quite productive wild cranberry 
bogs nearly all over the southern half of this state where surround- 
ing lands areof clay strongly impregnated with lime, and mostexcel- 
lent grass or grain lands; but it may be invariably noticed that these 
cranberry bogs are of peat built up of wire grass roots and sphag- 
num moss of a considerable depth and without any admixture of 
the surrounding clay soil, their situation being such that the soil 
and clay washed from the surrounding high grounds can none of it 
ever be lodged there. It will also be found that water in sucha 
*The cranberry bears about the same botanical relation to the blueberry that 
the blackberry does to the dewberry. Itisof thesame genus but of a different 
species. 
