Irrigation 
RESULTS OF SOIL MOISTURE TESTS IN IRRIGATION 
EXPERIMENTS 
F. W. Stanley, 
Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen : 
Last year while at our Palatka meet¬ 
ing, I promised to give you some of the 
results of our experiment, with soil tests 
in connection with furrow irrigation, and 
also showing the effects of cultivation in 
conservation of available moisture for 
the tree roots. 
The charts shown are very general in 
character, as too much detail is not pos¬ 
sible in a short paper, so the conclusions 
must be taken to apply to soil and crop 
conditions similar to those at, and near 
Orlando, where the soil is very light and 
sandy and the clay substrata is six or 
more feet beneath the surface. 
(The charts are made to show graphi¬ 
cally the path of the moisture after run¬ 
ning in open furrows for 40 minutes, and 
for 15 minutes in the Walter Drennen 
Grove at Maitland, showing path of moist¬ 
ure both in percentages of soil moisture 
contained and the cross sections of the 
same. Another chart shows graphically 
percentage of moisture contained in the 
soil in cultivated and noncultivated groves 
also in cultivated and noncultivated open 
space, where the moisture can not be ef¬ 
fected by tree roots). 
Orlando, Fla. 
The conclusions derived from the 
charts are very decided. It is plainly 
shown that the sandy soils of Florida will 
not permit running water for long lengths 
of time in open furrows as is the common 
practice among California irrigators. If 
the soils are as loose and porous as at 
Maitland, it is a good plan to run water in 
open furrows not over 20 minutes. It is 
seen that running water for 40 minutes 
results in considerable waste below the 
6th foot, which probably means that the 
water has gone- beyond the reach of any 
tree roots. In fact it is not likely that 
any appreciable amount of feeding roots 
from the orange tree reach below the 4th 
foot, while most of them are between the 
surface and the second foot. Capillary at¬ 
traction will draw water upwards for 
several feet in some soils but this action 
seems to be very slight in the sandy Flo¬ 
rida soils, especially when the soil gets 
very dry. 
When water was run fifteen minutes 
in open ditches or furrows it is seen that 
there was no waste below the third foot, 
at any time, which would mean that the 
tree roots probably took up about all the 
moisture. The moisture curves for suc- 
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