OCR Text |
Show DEPTH FOR IRRIGATION DITCH To Make Soil Retain Moisture It Must Be Kept Well Mulched Deep Plowing Necessary. If the soil is dry and hard and the water will not go into it, the irrigation ditches must be made below the hard layer of soil. It is necessary in many of the orchards to make the ditches with a plow. Make them deep with wide bottoms where the soil is heavy or made up of fine particles. In light sandy soil it is not necesoary to make the ditches so deep, the ordinary shallow, shal-low, narrow-bottomed ditches are good under such conditions, writes R. E. Tremble of Wenatchee, Wash., in the Western Farmer. To make the soil retain moisture it must be kept well mulched, a dust mulch is very good, but it must be kept well worked and the mulch should be three or four inches deep. Another great help in making the soil hold moisture is to keep a good quantity of humus in the soil. This can be done by plowing under cover crop or by applying manure, or both. The best method for our conditions, since there will be always a shortage of manure, is to grow a cover crop and add a small quantity of manure to the cover crop and plow both under together. to-gether. We must provide for the continuous con-tinuous additions of humus to the soil for in this district the humus is very soon consumed out of the soil. For a soil to properly receive the moisture from an irrigation, it must be in good physical condition. It is impossible to properly irrigate a soil which is in a poor physical condition. Many orchard soils are in a poor physical phys-ical condition purely because they have not been properly plowed,' or. what worse, have not been plowed at all. With orchards properly plowed at the right time, irrigation is much more efficient, and it is easier done. |