When a bog is to be opened, a deep ditch is run from an outlet or lowest point a short distance into the peat bed, and the working goes on from the banks of this ditch. It is important that system be followed in raising the peat, or there will be great waste of fuel and of labor.
If, as often happens, the peat is so soft in the wet season as to break on the vertical walls of a ditch and fill it, at the same time dislocating the mass and spoiling it for cutting, it is best to carry down the ditch in terraces, making it wide above and narrow at the bottom.
The simplest mode of procedure, consists in laying off a "field" or plot of, say 20 feet square, and making vertical cuts with a sharp spade three or four inches deep from end to end in parallel lines, as far apart as it is proposed to make the breadth of the peats or sods, usually four to five inches. Then, the field is cut in a similar manner in lines at right angles to the first, and at a distance that shall be the length of the peats, say 18 to 20 inches. Finally, the workman lifts the peats by horizontal thrusts of his spade, made at a depth of three inches. The sods as lifted, are placed on a light barrow or upon a board or rack, and are carried off to a drying ground, near at hand, where they are laid down flatwise to drain and dry. In Ireland, it is the custom, after the peats have lain thus for a fortnight or so, to "foot" them, i. e. to place them on end close together; after further drying the "footing" is succeeded by "clamping," which is building the sods up into stacks of about twelve to fifteen feet long, four feet wide at bottom, narrowing to one foot at top, with a height of four to five feet. The outer turfs are inclined so as to shed the rain. The peat often remains in these clamps on the bog until wanted for use, though in rainy seasons the loss by crumbling is considerable.
[Illustration: Fig. 2.--GERMAN PEAT-KNIFE.]
Other modes of lifting peat, require tools of particular construction.... In Germany it is common to excavate by _vertical_ thrusts of the tool, the cutting part of which is represented above, fig. 2. This tool is pressed down into the peat to a depth corresponding to the thickness of the required block: its three edges cut as many sides of the block, and the bottom is then broken or torn out by a prying motion.