6 The Colorado Experiment Station 
yielded as many as fifty boxes of apples at a picking. The young 
orchards alluded to are not confined to one section of the State, 
and I recall at this time nine such orchards. 
The only reason for writing of orchards rather than of other 
crops is that the injury is more obvious in the case of trees than 
of some other crops, alfalfa for instance. Complaint has been re¬ 
ceived very often that alfalfa is dying in spots. It does not follow 
that every spot of dead alfalfa has been killed by this so-called black 
alkali,but many of those that the writer has seen, have been. The 
same may be said of sugar beets. Sometimes large spots of bare 
ground occur surrounded by a very large growth of tops, with a few 
plants scattered throughout the area, showing a similar luxuriance 
in the growth of the leaves. This condition is, as a rule, associated 
with the brown color of the surface with a slightly incrusted, and 
under this a mealy condition of the surface soil. These are not the 
only questions which have to be considered in regard to the effects 
of this condition on the crops, but they are visible effects which can 
be easily recognized; the effects upon the quality of the crops grown 
cannot be seen by the eye but must be studied and determined in 
other ways. 
Inasmuch as the injury to the trees observed during the season 
of 1909 did not seem to affect the roots of the trees, I hoped that 
there would be, at least, some recovery in the case of those trees 
which did not die outright at the time of the attack, but observa¬ 
tions of such trees this spring, 1910, give but little reason to expect 
any recovery. Whether this is due to the fatal effects of the poison 
present last year, or to an injurious supply of it in the soil at the 
present time, I do not know. I cannot candidly state that I have 
seen a single case of recovery but I have, on the other hand, seen a 
number of cases in which there is no reason to expect the trees to 
live. 
We have now stated something about the occurrence and dis¬ 
tribution of these brown spots, their appearance and visible effects 
upon vegetation. We do not know when they began to appear but 
some of them have been observed for several years past. This con¬ 
dition is rapidly becoming more prevalent. The land occupied 
by the orchards referred to as having been seriously injured in 
1909, had evidently not been in such bad condition before during 
the time that they had occupied the land, from 14 to 27 years in the 
different cases. 
The people very generally refer to the spots as “black alkali 
spots,” but there is no sodic carbonate or only a very little of it in 
such spots and the color is not due to dissolved humus as would be 
the case if black alkali were present. These black spots, moreover, 
are only very extreme cases of a condition which is very widely 
