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The eastern part of the country, the "Hügelland", has been 
shaped by the Weichselian glaciation into a typical knob and 
kettle relief with a multitude of lakes. The soils formed on 
calcic loams are associations of brown earth, lessives, pseu- 
dogleys and gleys. Farm type further divides this part of the 
country into Angeln, the NW-Hills, the SW-Hills and the O1- 
denburgian. 
Emanating from the Weichselian moraines to the west, lies a 
belt of sandy glacial outwash, the so called "Lower Geest". 
Soils are poor and consist of wet podsols combined with gleys 
and peats. The glacial meltwater streams have flowed around 
and divided deposits of the older Saalian glaciation, the 
hills of the "Upper Geest". These deposits have long ago been 
leached of carbonates and clays, and the remaining sands and 
sandy loams have been subject to periglacial processes like 
cryoturbation and cryoplanation. They carry strongly developed 
podsols. Large swamps and peats prevail in the depressions of 
both landscapes, which agriculturally are regarded as one unit. 
Next to parent material and soils, climate contributes also to 
the differentiation of landscapes. The country is subject to 
year round westerly winds and its position between the North- 
and the Baltic sea endows the country with a temperate mari- 
time climate. Summer temperatures average 16°C, while winter 
temperatures lie around the freezing point. Annual precipi- 
tation is reatively low on the West Coast (700 mm), increases 
with the slight though important elevation of the moraines to 
more than 8oo mm and decreases slowly to less than 600 mm in 
the east. This distribution and the variations of temperature 
and precipitation in the course of the year indicate a tenden- 
cy from a maritime climate in the north-west to a more con- 
tinental in the south-east. 
Agriculture, as indicated by the example of wheat cropping 
influences also the appearance of the landscape. The percen- 
tage of wheat cropping is highest in the east and the west 
on fertile soils, while it makes up less than 20 % of ar- 
able land on the poor soils of the Geest. 
5.1 Construction of crop calendar tables (see Figs. 2 to 4) 
A crop calendar is a diagram, which shows at a glance what 
phenomena to expect at a certain date on an image of a cer- 
tain landscape. The data used have partly been obtained from 
the German Wheather Service using their observations over a 
period of 10-25 years (SCHNELLE et al., 1965/70; FREITAG, 
1976; WITTERSTEIN, 1977). Other data have been taken from 
reports of Schleswig-Holstein test farms ranging from 1969 
to 1977 (LANDWIRTSCHAFTSKAMMER, 1969/77, 1978). In the latter 
case, the deviations from the mean date of occurence of an 
agro-phenological phase are not so great as during a 25 year 
period, but at comparable crops good coincidence of mean 
dates have been found. As will be noted, not all agricultu- 
ral and phenological phases are included for some crops. 
This is due to a lack or incompleteness of statistics cover- 
ing these phases, making predictions unsafe. Further work 
will be required in this direction, especially since the 
German Wheather Service has collected phenological data so