NURSERY PRACTICE FOR PRAIRIE-PLAINS PLANTING 43 



The soils listed as occurring on bottom land may be subject to 

 flooding during periods of high water. If a nursery is to be located on 

 these soils, a careful investigation should be made as to the height of 

 past flood stages in relation to the proposed nursery site. There are. 

 of course, other upland soils that are also suitable for growing deciduous 

 nursery stock but the water table is generally deeper and development 

 of an irrigation system is more expensive on the upland sites. 



Chemical Composition and Soil Analyses 



The soil of the nursery site should be of high fertility and reasonably 

 free from harmful alkalis. Inadequate soil fertility and a poor balance 

 of nutrients result in a relatively large percent of cull stock and high 

 production costs, and proper fertilization and cropping methods are 

 necessary for optimum production. Expressed in a general way. any 

 moderately sandy soil that is producing good yields of agricultural 

 crops such as wheat, corn or sorghum, and cotton will produce satis- 

 factory deciduous stock. Deciduous seedlings require more fertile 

 and somewhat heavier soils than do most of the conifers. 



Soil analyses can be of value in selecting nursery soils and also in 

 determining to some extent soil fertilization and crop-rotation practice. 

 These analyses may be expressed either in terms of total or available 

 nutrients. In recent years, analyses based on the relative availability 

 of various nutrients such as phosphorus and potash have been favored 

 over the method wherein total analyses only are considered. Soils 

 may sometimes show fairly high values in total analyses and still not 

 have an adequate supply of nutrients in a form readily available for 

 plant growth. For example, a soil may test fairly high in total phos- 

 phorus but still be low in readily available phosphorus, because the 

 phosphorus is tied up in a relatively insoluble state by iron, aluminum, 

 or calcium. 



In order to arrive at some preliminary conclusions on the relation 

 of soil condition to the quality of nursery stock produced, analyses 

 were made of the same prairie-plains nursery soils represented in 

 table 7. 



The resulting data, shown in table S. include several nurseries where 

 patches of " alkali" soils caused difficulty. These patches ranged 

 from 20 to 50 or more feet in diameter and in most of the prairie- 

 plains nurseries were caused by so-called white alkalis. The data 

 presented reveal some striking differences in soils; even in the same 

 nursery variations were so great as to cause a marked difference in the 

 quality of the stock. 



At Towner Nursery good response was obtained from treatments 

 of 20 tons of sheep manure fortified by 150 to 200 pounds per acre of 

 45-percent superphosphate. 



The problem areas in the Pierre and Midway nurseries are small 

 saline spots on which seedlings build up salts in the plant tissue. 

 This interferes with the normal metabolism of the plant and so causes 

 it to develop poorly. In both nurseries there is a higher soluble salt 

 content in the more alkali spots, especially in Midway nursery where 

 there is an appreciably higher content of sodium and potash salts. 



