66 FARM DEVELOPMENT 



much vegetable matter. When peat is well rotted, it is 

 sometimes called muck, a soil term also applied to rich 

 mud in the bottoms of streams or standing water. 



In other cases, peat is built up on flat, level lands, 

 where the constant supply of waters flowing down a 

 long, nearly flat incline, or out of a seepy hillside, 

 furnishes moisture to preserve the dead vegetable mat- 

 ter from decaying and supplies the needed conditions 

 for the growth of peat-forming plants. These stretches 

 of peaty lands, sometimes many miles across, are often 

 covered with trees, such as tamarack and spruce; in 

 other cases they bear only small shrubs, in some local- 

 ities called heath, and in other places wild grasses and 

 sedges grow. Dead trees, falling down, often become a 

 part of the mass of peat in these low places, and mosses, 

 such as sphagnum, form a large part of the peaty sub- 

 stance. Peat bogs, natural meadows, and muskegs are 

 common names for wet areas of this class of soils, which, 

 by open drains and subdrains, may be converted into 

 arable soils suited to at least some of the crops grown 

 on upland soils. Peaty soils are usually not nearly as 

 valuable as good soils of mixed mineral particles. Some 

 are especially suited to certain vegetables, as celery; in 

 cold, temperate regions they grow better grasses, as red 

 top and timothy for hay, than cereal or leguminous crops. 



Alkaline soils occur where there is much evaporation 

 from the soil, and very little rainfall and poor drainage. 

 The alkaline character comes from compounds of soda 

 and other alkaline compounds brought to the surface by 

 the water, which rises by capillarity and evaporates, 

 leaving the alkali either as a white or colored crust or in 

 the soil near the surface. The plant roots find the water 

 in the soil so strongly impregnated with certain of these 

 alkaline salts that they do not make a healthy growth. 

 Some soils contain such an excess of alkaline salts that 

 they are nearly or quite worthless. 



