tage of plowing wet top soil.
It is equally disadvantageous to blast a wet subsoil. Of course, some
subsoils are always in a more or less damp condition and never get
thoroughly dried out, but they may be safely and advantageously blasted
when they are in their dryest condition.

Water-logged soil should never be blasted except for the purpose of
ditching it or tiling it so as to get it into a proper condition for
blasting. The ditching may be done economically and quickly with
dynamite, and in many cases this will answer just as well as the more
expensive tiling. When the ditching or tiling has drained this subsoil,
it may then be safely blasted.

_Filling the Pot-Holes_:

In any heavy soil the explosion of the dynamite tends to form a cavity
in the immediate vicinity of the cartridge, varying from one to two feet
in diameter. The heavier or the wetter the subsoil, the larger this
cavity is likely to be. After the blast the top soil should be shoveled
out and laid to one side; next shovel out the subsoil and lay it on the
other side of the hole; continue this excavation until the pot-hole is
reached, then be careful to fill this hole reasonably tight with
subsoil, the object being to prevent the possibility of soil falling
away from the roots of a tree after planting, and leaving it suspended
in the air. This is the cause of the death of trees planted in dynamited
holes which some unsuccessful experimenters report. It takes a little
time to fill this pot-hole, but the many advantages of planting trees
properly in dynamited holes more than offset this extra time and trouble
required to properly prepare the hole.

_Planting the Trees_:

After the pot-hole has been filled, continue to shovel in subsoil until
the proper height is reached for planting the tree, then throw in half
the top soil and spread the roots on that in their natural positions,
then throw in the remainder of the top soil, next get in the hole and
walk around the tree several times, tramping the top soil down tight
around the roots so as to remove all large air spaces that surround the
roots, then fill the hole to the surface with subsoil. Planting a tree
in this way costs a few cents more per tree than the old way, but since
the tree can only be planted once and the comparative records as to loss
of trees the first year after planting, show an average advantage of 30
per cent. in favor of dynamited trees, namely, the loss is cut down from
three to