498 INVESTIGATION BY CULTURE EXPERIMENTS 



It is highly probable that a liberal use of kainit would also be 

 profitable for a time in getting such systems under way on the more 

 depleted soils. It must be kept in mind that crops must be grown 

 before either farm manure or green manure can be plowed under. 



NOTES. On the Coastal Plains, especially from North Carolina to Florida, 

 are some extensive areas of very sandy soils. For truck farming these be- 

 come very productive where heavily fertilized, but they are commonly too 

 poor to be used profitably for general farming. Thus, Bulletin 68 of the 

 Florida Agricultural Experiment Station contains 40 chemical analyses of 

 the ordinary very sandy loams upon which nearly all of the pineapples pro- 

 duced in that state are grown, and in commenting upon these soils the 

 authors say, " Few of the soils would be able to produce more than two or 

 three crops of pineapples if all the plant food present were available." 



This statement is well supported by analyses of samples of soil, representative 

 of large areas in Southern Florida, which were collected by Professor F. H. 

 King in 1910 and analyzed with the following results: 



AVERAGE POUNDS IN 2 MILLION OF SOIL 



Two analyses of the peat or "muck" soil from the Everglades swamps of 

 Florida show the following amounts per million : 



While these " muck " or peat soils are rich in nitrogen and calcium, they 

 are either poor or extremely poor in phosphorus, potassium, and magnesium. 



