Thomas black walnut trees came from E. A. Riehl, Godfrey, Illinois. The

variety had originated in eastern Pennsylvania and was first grafted in

1881 by J. W. Thomas and Son, at King of Prussia, Pa. The parent tree

had been destroyed some time before by the Pennsylvania Railroad, in

extending its lines. The Thomas is today the most widely planted

variety, although it has rarely borne well. Mr. Jones selected and

grafted the Ohio walnut, but the owner of the seed-parent tree was given

credit for its introduction, although she probably knows nothing of the

incident, to this day. She was a Miss Clark, McCutcheonville, Ohio, and

it was felt that it would help more to give her name as originator if

one were ever to locate the tree.

[See Ohio black walnut original tree photos, NNGA Rept., 1946.--Ed.]

The Stabler eastern black walnut, introduced in 1916 by Mr. T. P.

Littlepage by means of a paragraph inserted in the _Country Gentleman_,

was also propagated by Mr. Jones, but he early found it disappointing in

its habits of bearing. He also found that about 80 percent of the nuts

from the parent tree had single kernels, while with young trees 80

percent had double kernels. Most planters have long since discontinued

using this variety. However, Mrs. Jane Baum, Douglassville, Pa., reports

that her customers like the Stabler best. Others she has are Thomas,

Ohio, and Ten Eyck.

Other varieties were tested by Mr. Jones, but he pushed none of them,

rightly thinking that 4 leaders were as many as a nursery could afford

to carry. He insisted that a new variety would have to prove its

superiority before he would insert it in his catalog. Among other

varieties was the Peanut from southern Ohio, the nut of which had single

lobes; but apparently there was some mistake along the line, as nuts

from grafted trees were indifferent and had 2 half kernels. He also had

Creitz from Indiana, which Mr. H. F. Stoke, 1436 Watts Avenue, Roanoke,

Va., thinks well of at this time. It was a prize winner in the 1926

contest of the NNGA. Neither Creitz nor Peanut was a Jones introduction.

+His Work with Hickories+

Among the hickories, there was the Stanley from Indiana in 1916, which

was quite a favorite with Mr. Jones for some time. But did any one ever

see a shellbark that bore well and filled the nuts? Shellbark trees are

beautiful to look at, have enormous leaves, seven to nine leaflets, but

they leaf out early in spring and the flowers are frequently killed back

by spring frosts. Part of its flowers are killed outright with too great

frequency for it to be worth growing for the nuts. These are very large,

the hulls split entirely to the base, and what kernel there is, is of

sugar-like sweetness. The shells are mostly thick and the kernels seldom

well-filled.

The Glover shagbark hickory, from Connecticut, which was introduced by

Mr. Jones in 1918, is undoubtedly one of the best shagbarks yet

propagated. The nuts are of medium size and shell thickness. The flavor

is very good. Most shagbarks have five leaflets; this one has seven

quite as often, and the leaf is about a foot long.

There were other hybrids, or what are supposed to be hybrids. The Pleas

hickory, introduced in 1916, was perhaps first successfully grafted by

Mr. Jones, but credit for introduction went to the owner of the parent

tree, Dr. E. Pleas, Collinsville, Oklahoma. It was a beautiful tree,

shapely, with an air of considerable refinement, making it a graceful

lawn tree. It bore fairly well, although not heavily. The nuts were

thin-shelled and also had thin hulls that split entirely to the base. So

far as most laymen are concerned, the Pleas may be but an edible, or

semi-edible bitternut. On the grounds of the Plant Industry Station, at

Beltsville, Md., there were once two trees of Pleas, but they were given

to the Wild Life Service for planting 10 miles away, although there are

many native bitternut trees just over the line fence in neighboring

woods. We fancied that we could detect bitternut flavor in good

shagbarks about the plantings, due to xenia influence, as in the case of

chestnuts.

Burlington was another hican first propagated by Mr. Jones, in 1915. It

came from eastern Iowa, and for a time was confused with Marquardt,

which never was propagated, or apparently not. Burlington makes a fine

appearing tree and serves well for ornamental purposes. It bears fairly

well while young, but soon develops faulty nuts, few being well-filled

and the majority weevil infested. It is also subject to shuck-worm and

twig girdler injury.

Mr. Jones once wrote that he had given up with the hickories "in

disgust." So far as is known, he never used any stock for hickories

other than pecan, which grew well, made good unions and generally

outgrew the scions. John Hershey, however, says this is not a good

combination, but there are too many trees of Jones' propagation about

the country, to accept Hershey's verdict altogether. Carl Weschcke[23],

of St. Paul, uses bitternut largely or entirely; if it is a mistake, it

will be expensive. Hickories are slow to grow and one gets too few nuts

at best. It takes a lifetime to get even small crops, and for our part,

we want no bitternuts on the place. Too often shagbarks fail to unite

with bitternut and frequently they are short-lived.

In 1916 Mr. Jones propagated and introduced the Beaver hickory, from

central Pennsylvania, a supposed bitternut-shagbark cross. It proved of

little value and soon disappeared. The Fairbanks from northeast Iowa, a

similar cross, was introduced the same year. It was one of the prettiest

of all hybrids and stood up about the longest, but it had too much

bitterness in the pellicle encasing the kernel and was much subject to

weevil injury.

+Efforts with Persian Walnuts+

Many varieties of Persian (English) walnut were propagated and brought

into bearing. Mr. Jones included a majority of the varieties brought

into the country from France by Felix Gillet, of Nevada City, Calif., as

early as 1870. There were Franquette, Mayette, Meylan, Parisienne, and a

cutleaf variety which appears to have had no other name. A California

variety of which he thought well for a number of years was Eureka, a

western introduction of 1908. He propagated a number of eastern

varieties such as Lancaster (Alpine) in 1913, although credit went to

Mr. Rush; Boston, from Massachusetts, also in 1913; Ontario, from

Canada, in 1914; and probably others. He obtained Chinese walnuts, from

P. Wang, Kinsan Arboretum, Shanghai, and sold seedlings at wholesale.

These were an Asiatic form of _Juglans regia_. He limed the soil, and

thought the effects were beneficial. In this he was warmly supported by

T. P. Littlepage and more recently by growers in Northern Ohio; but

lately liming has not been found beneficial in Italy. All in all,

however, the Persian walnut was not particularly dependable, and during

the last few years the nursery which he left discontinued selling

Persian walnut trees. In the East, the trees of older varieties usually

were little more than interesting novelties.

+He Tried the Chinese Chestnut+

The Chinese chestnut was tried for a few years; but as so often happens

with this species, nursery trees died badly in winter and Mr. Jones

thought it due to blight, a disease which was then sweeping his part of

the country, taking its mortal toll of both American and European

species. However, blight does not seriously attack young trees and it is

more likely that death was caused by a combination of summer drouth and

winter cold; but no matter, the trees perished and the result was the

same.

+First Heartnut Grafts+

Mr. Jones tried the butternut and there is still one tree in the

experimental planting east of the residence. It is Aiken, from New

England, and was first propagated by him in 1918. It proved

disappointing. He grafted the first heartnut ever grafted of any kind

insofar as is known, the Lancaster, in 1918. The only other heartnut for

which he received full credit for first propagation was Faust, obtained

from a dentist, Dr. 0. D. Faust, Bamberg, S. C., in 1918. Others that he

was doubtless first to propagate, but for which credit went to the

owners of the parent trees, were Bates and Stranger in 1919, both from

R. Bates, Jackson, Aiken County, S. C., and Ritchie, a Virginia variety

found by John W. Ritchie of Flemington, N. J., in 1918.

However, heartnuts are seldom heavy bearers and the trees do not grow

large or live long. In Japan the wood is sometimes used for gunstocks

but only because better material is unavailable. Heartnuts have

practically no market where other kinds of nuts can be had and the trees

are much subject to "bunch" disease. To an enormous extent the trees

have been sold to unsuspecting people of the South and East as "English"

walnuts.

[Footnote 23: See Weschcke's paper, elsewhere in this report.--Ed.]

+The Filbert+

Mr. Jones had a tree or two of the Turkish filbert, a species sometimes

reaching a height of 60 feet and attaining a trunk diameter of three

feet or more. Bixby found the species hardy in central New Hampshire.

Mr. Jones obtained his seed from three trees in Highland Park,

Rochester, New York, which are believed to be the oldest in the country.

In some years, the Rochester trees bear freely, while in others there is

not a nut. This is a valuable ornamental species, as it is green from

early spring till the last thing in fall; specimens must be selected for

such use, as often the trees are unshapely. Like all filberts, they are

subject to Japanese beetle attack and must be sprayed or otherwise

protected in beetle infested zones. Filbert foliage may be destroyed by

these insects as many as three times in a summer and the trees die down

to the ground. The nuts are too small to be of value; but the wood is

white, very hard, and makes good turned articles.

+His Greatest Contribution+

It was with the filbert that Mr. Jones made his greatest contribution to

nut culture. In 1917 he tried crossing European varieties with pollen of

the native Rush. There were no results, and he tried again in 1918 with

no better luck. In 1919 he reversed the order of crossing and nearly

every nut set. He had discovered that native pollen was not effective on

European stigmas, but that the reciprocal cross worked. By 1924 he had a

fine lot of fruiting plants. The great majority were of no value, but

his No. 200 apparently was well worth while. It was named Bixby in 1937,

four years after another seedling, No. 91, had been named Buchanan. The

explanation of this belated selection is that the soil about the Bixby

tree had so eroded that the tree was starved for a time; but with a

couple of years of heavy application of stable manure, it came back, so

much so that it is now considered the better of the two. Both are rather

small as compared with the large filberts of the Pacific Northwest; but

when fully mature, they are sweet and agreeable.

After Mr. Jones was gone, the place was managed by his daughter, Miss

Mildred Jones. She kept plants of her father's filbert varieties and the

best of the crosses. The latter are now called the Mildred filberts, a

name applied in _Standardized Plant Names_ to the entire group of

crosses between Rush American and any European filbert. Mr. Jones hoped

to have these called after himself but there was an old variety of Jones

"hazel" and so his own name could not be used. He once sent specimens to

Dr. C. S. Sargent of Arnold Arboretum and somehow gained the impression

that the name Jones was given to the cross. Later, however, Sargent's

successor, Mr. Alfred Rehder wrote that Sargent had not used the name in

either correspondence or on specimens placed in the herbarium.

The example of Mr. Jones in breeding filberts has since been followed by

others, as the Department of Agriculture, the New York State

Agricultural Experiment Station at Geneva, and. Mr. Carl Weschcke of St.

Paul, Minnesota. The last has copyrighted his crosses under the

designation "hazilbert," which is a good name; but with the issue of

_Standardized Plant Names_ in 1942, the name "hazel" was dropped for all

members of the family. For a time, an effort was made to distinguish

between the two by calling small-fruited ones "hazels" and those with

large fruits "filberts," but there is not exact dividing line and so now

all are called filberts.

Buchanan and Bixby are the only varieties of Mildred filberts thus far

fully released by anyone and although neither variety is entirely hardy

in the northernmost parts of the country, they do well as far south as

eastern Tennessee. The nuts of both are too small to compete in the

market with the large filberts of Oregon and Washington, but that is not

the purpose for which they have been bred. It is for home planting, a

use for which they are admirably adapted. Neither variety should be

judged until after they have cured fully, at least a month or more. Then

the flavor is excellent.

Of the various introductions made by Mr. Jones, the ones most likely to

endure are the Ohio black walnut, the Glover shagbark hickory, and the

Mildred filberts. The first has already lasted 32 years; the second 30

years; and the Mildred filberts are only nicely started.[24]

[Footnote 24: Except for the last two paragraphs, this paper was read

and approved by Miss Mildred Jones in Pavilion, N. Y., on September 2,

1948. The following day, or September 3, she became Mrs. Wesley Langdoc,

of P. O. Box 126, Erie, Illinois.]

+Mr. Reed Comments on Seedling Trees+

+Editor's Note:+ The next two paragraphs should be read in connection with

the "Round Table" on chestnut problems, elsewhere in this volume.

In a broad sense, it must be remembered that every variety of seedling

tree, of any species and every hybrid form that has ever been planted,

or grafted on another tree, has been worth something. This is still a

free country and every man has the inalienable right to plant whatever

he pleases. Even the hybrids of various forms, hickory, walnut, and

chestnut, are all worth something. All are trees and it is better to

plant a poor kind of tree than not to plant anything, particularly if it

is a nut tree. Whatever prompts a man to plant a tree is worth while.

Hybrid chestnuts bred by crossing Chinese chestnuts of unknown

performance record as to habit of bearing, size or flavor of nut, shape

of tree, resistance to blight, or spring freezes, and other

characteristics which combine to make good nuts, with the inferior and

largely inedible Japanese chestnuts, are unlikely to do the damage to

the industry that is sometimes predicted. They are now so mixed up that

few will be planted by themselves, and there is considerable evidence

that the xenia influence of good Chinese chestnuts with which the trees

are being planted will render nuts from these hybrid trees fit to market

and eat.

[Illustration: MILDRED AND WESLEY LANGDOC]

President Davidson: The value of nut trees in Tennessee, then, will be

discussed by Mr. F. S. Chance of the Tennessee Agricultural Experiment

Station in Knoxville.

The Value of Nut Trees in Tennessee

F. S. CHANCE, Vice-Director, Tennessee Agricultural Experiment Station,

Knoxville, Tennessee.

Mr. Chance: Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen: As a representative of

the Agricultural Experiment Station of the University of Tennessee I

want to say it is a great honor to have this distinguished group meet

here in Tennessee, especially on the banks of beautiful Norris Lake,

which is one of the tributaries to the dammedest river in the country.

We are something like 600 miles from the Gilbertsville Dam, or Kentucky

Dam near Paducah, Kentucky, and this area here is the beginning of a

chain of lakes that run just about that far.

For those of you who are from a distance, you may know that in making a

chain of lakes out of this great Tennessee Valley that we covered up

lots of good land. We have developed lots of good power. Now, I am not

just sure why I was put on this program, because, really I am not a nut

tree specialist, as I see most of you people are. I will admit that I

have been associating with experimentation for the last eight or ten

years and have become slightly nutty, but really my big interest is

timber. I am still a blockhead. So in discussing and talking with you

this morning for a few minutes about the value of nut trees in Tennessee

I want you to just keep in the back of your minds that the thing in the

timber world that I think is the prettiest when it comes to furniture is

black walnut.

So in some plantings that we made several years ago with the help of

Spencer Chase at our various substations and at the parent station at

Knoxville, when we began to prune those trees I wanted to go to pruning

for timber and he wanted to go to pruning for nuts. He won. So as we

developed these plantings we are sure that we are going to have some

very excellent nut trees.

Tennessee ranging in altitude from something over a mile high down to

some 300 or 350 feet at Memphis on the Mississippi gives us a very, very

wide range of climate. This wide range of climate gives us the

possibility of growing a very wide range of timber trees. A great part

of that area is soil from a limestone formation. Nearly all parts of

Tennessee are well adapted to the production of the black walnut. The

tree as a nut tree has not in the past been looked at with such great

interest. However, there are farms in Tennessee that have been purchased

with walnut kernels. Over the period of years, why, thrifty families,

especially in Eastern Tennessee sections, have gathered up the walnuts

in the neighborhood round about, cracked them and sold the kernels and

from year to year made certain accumulations of that kind, funds, and

saved them with enough in the bank or in the sock to buy a farm. I knew

one particular person who bought a nice farm in just that way.

Now, a great many of the people in the same neighborhood did not save

their walnuts. These walnuts were gathered from everybody's trees

without any objection on the part of anyone. But it was a means of those

people getting ahead with their savings from their other farming

operations, and this wintertime work that they could put in, why, that

kind of thrift is the kind that gets people ahead who want to get ahead

and have vision.

I might say a few words about pecans in Tennessee. We have throughout

the state quite a few scattered native pecans that are used, especially

in all except the more western sections of the state. As a whole they

are for home use. Now, in the extreme western section of the state we

have a certain amount of seedling pecans, mostly, that produce a

considerable income to a limited number of people. In the 1945 census

something over 4,000 farms reported some income from pecans--this was

mostly in the western section of the state--the value of which was

something over $32,000, which at the present time would be a

considerable under-valuation.

This tree is found, I might say, throughout the state. I recall a few

years ago coming off of the Cumberland Plateau down in Warren County

into the cove there around Viola and seeing a beautiful grove of pecans

along a stream. I hadn't been through that country before, but I had

known a family that lived there, and I stopped at a house to see just

what those pecans meant. And there was an old lady on the porch who

owned the property, and I asked her some questions about it, and she

told me how they got there and knew when they were not there. She had

been raised on that place but she said, "I want to show you something."

So I went with her around the side yard into the back yard, and she had

a couple of pecan trees there that were loaded with pecans until the

limbs were hanging over just like pear tree limbs, heavily loaded pear

tree limbs. I said, "My, what a crop of pecans you have here. That's

really wonderful." Those were the budded pecans, the type that is grown

farther south of us. She said, "Just wait a minute, now. I don't know

whether I have any pecans or not." I said, "What do you mean?" She said,

"If the frost is two weeks later than usual we will have a wonderful

pecan crop, if we have a late frost. If we have an early frost we don't

have any pecans."

It was quite interesting to me to see that wonderful crop hanging on the

tree and yet she wasn't at all assured that anything of value would come

from it.

We have on some of our holdings at the University experimental Stations

some wonderful Chinese chestnut trees. I can't get overly excited over

them, remembering the chestnut as we had it once in Tennessee with the

long, slender body, wonderful telephone poles and wonderful timber of

other kinds, and to see that a tremendous economic loss has come to this

country through disease that was and probably is not controllable. But

from the nut standpoint we have at the present time some trees that look

as though they are going to be the equal of our own native chestnut that

covered Tennessee from the mountain top to the river bank. So we are

very much in hope that again Tennessee will have a supply of chestnuts

which will be equivalent, probably, to the harvest of chestnuts we once

had. However, that's going to be many, many years off.

From the experimental standpoint I have been very much interested in the

timber type of tree, hoping that our native chestnut trees, at least one

out of the billions, maybe would prove to be resistant. However,

watching these growths come up from time to time and attain an age

sufficient to produce nuts and then have my hopes blighted by going back

the next year and finding that the tree was blighted has become rather

discouraging. I hope that some of you people will find just such a tree,

one that will bear an excellent nut and at the same time produce

excellent timber.

Now I am coming to our big asset in the way of nut trees in Tennessee,

as I see it. I was rather interested here in Professor Moore's

discussion of the honeylocust, that detestable tree which was such a

thorn in my flesh as a child, and having heard someone championing it

with such a story as he had, I have heard everything now. Everybody,

though, has a champion. Even my mother loved me, regardless.

Black walnut is, as I said in the beginning, native to all sections of

the state, and I think that through the collection of the better

yielding or better cracking nuts by the Tennessee Valley Authority we

are going to find in this crop a very potent asset to the state of

Tennessee through the income from sale of nuts. We have in the state

about four cracking plants. One of them is located in Morristown. Down

in the basin part of the state where walnuts do particularly well, three

others are in the city of Nashville. There were something like 10

million pounds of walnuts in the shell delivered in Nashville this last

year, yielding about 1,200,000 pounds of kernels. Now, this is no mean

return from a crop which was really just gathered up with very, very

little attention given to the planting. It is just one of these free

crops, so to speak.

If we were to add to that income the great income which we have been

receiving through the years from the sale of timber trees, we would run

the value of the black walnut into considerable proportions, with income

from the sale of black walnuts in the kernel and in timber.

I see no particular reason why that crop cannot be increased ten, twenty

or a hundred fold by just a stimulation of interest in the black walnut.

I recall back just previous to World War I, or about that time, there

was a tremendous demand, as usual, for black walnut for gun stocks. I

happened to be free for a month or so at that time so I could give some

attention to the purchasing and delivery of both veneer stock and walnut

for gun stocks. It was quite interesting to me as I went over a couple

of counties in which I made some purchases, to see that someone in the

40, 50 or 60 years back had had a vision of what the walnut tree would

be worth to them on their tracts of land and how we were at that time

reaping the harvest of the person who had a vision of the value of the

walnut tree. A great many of those trees were trees that had been set or

walnuts that had been planted years before by some far-seeing person,

and it had gone on without any interruption, probably without the

slightest bit of protection, until the time that it was needed and

desperately needed for economic purposes.

We have some work going on also in connection with the planting of

walnuts in pasture fields. The returns _from the pasture_ in the

planting of walnut trees have been just practically the same, maybe a

little bit better in favor of the walnuts than where we did not have

walnuts in the pasture. This work is being conducted down at the Middle

Tennessee Agricultural Experiment Station of the University of Tennessee

at Columbia. We are using the walnut tree and also the black locust in

this experiment. We don't know what the future of it is going to be, but

those walnut trees have grown large enough so that they have had to be

thinned to keep them from putting too much shade over the ground.

I made a statement several years ago in the presence of quite a

distinguished agronomist or horticulturist that I had never seen a

walnut tree growing in the open, whether it was in the blue grass region

or outside of a blue grass region that did not have blue grass growing

under it. He looked at me askance, and I said, "Do you believe it?"

"Well, I don't know," he answered.

So we happened to be coming out of Quincy, Florida, up through southern

Georgia outside of the blue grass region, and we were both sitting in

the back seat of the car. Our driver drove up to a filling station, and

I saw this fellow looked up at a walnut tree over in the yard not very

far away, in fact, the next yard to the filling station. I somehow or

other sensed what he was thinking. He pushed his door open, got out. I

pushed my door open, went around the car and followed him. He walked up

to that walnut tree, turned around and said, "Well, it's there." He

turned around and walked back.

Now, of course, a condition may prevail in dense shade, where that does

not happen in young walnut trees, but I just happened to be right. There

is a symbiotic relationship between plants--I don't want to get into

that subject--but this one thing I am thinking, and that is that the

reason why they were able to get this good grazing from under these

walnut trees is that there is a relationship there between those two

plants that makes it ideal for the production of pasture grass, and blue

grass over a great many of our states is our leading grass.

I might say to the gentleman from Virginia that I had a letter from up

there a few days ago. I don't know why they wanted to write to me,

wanting to know if the walnut tree was _a legume_. So I presume that

that was the reason, that the grass grew very nicely under those trees.

I have taken too much of your valuable time. It certainly has been a

pleasure and an honor to be here and talk to you these few minutes.

Thank you.

* * * * *

President Davidson: Thank you, Mr. Chance. We will take a short recess.

(Recess taken.)

President Davidson: The meeting will now come to order, please. The

embryo development of the black walnut will be illustrated and discussed

by Dr. L. H. MacDaniels of Cornell University.

(Paper to appear in next volume.)

Dr. Crane: I was very glad Dr. MacDaniels' paper preceded mine, because

it does give you a very much better picture of the development of all of

our oily nuts, excepting the filbert and, of course, the almond to some

extent. But we take in pecans and the hickories and for the walnuts the

situation is quite general.

Now, this paper that I am going to read is one that our staff in nut

investigations has been working on for the past twenty or more years,

and we feel we know a lot about the growing and the development and

filling of nuts. And there is a lot in this paper that I think will be

of value to all nut growers regardless of the kind of nuts that we are

trying to grow.

The Development and Filling of Nuts

H. L. CRANE, Principal Horticulturist, United States Department of

Agriculture, Agricultural Research Administration, Bureau of Plant

Industry, Soils, and Agricultural Engineering, Division of Fruit and

Vegetable Crops and Diseases.

All nut growers are confronted with the problems involved in the

production of nuts of large size with well filled kernels that are

"bright" or light colored. Unsatisfactory development and filling of the

kernels is more often a cause of complaint by growers than any other

single factor affecting nut production. This is because all of our

commercial nuts now sold in the shell are priced on a basis of size and

the degree to which they are filled. The size and degree of filling of

the nuts varies not only from year to year, but from district to

district, orchard to orchard, and even in the same orchard, because nuts

of one variety may fill well and those of another poorly. This is true

even though the kind and variety of nut being produced is grown in a

locality usually having suitable climatic conditions for normal nut

production.

+Climatic Conditions+

Prevailing climatic conditions in any locality determine how well a

particular kind of nut will fill. For example, the pecan is native to

the southern part of the United States and a small area in northern

Mexico. In its native habitat the summers are long and the day and night

temperatures are uniformly high, with little difference between maximum

and minimum daily temperatures. When the pecan is grown under conditions

of shorter summers, or where there is a marked difference between night

and day temperatures, the nuts do not grow to proper size and the

kernels fill poorly, if at all. Although pecan trees are quite hardy and

may be grown successfully well north of their native limits, the normal

development of the nuts and the filling of them cannot be expected

there.

Good examples of the climactic effects can be cited. At Davis,

California, the pecan tree grows, flowers, and sets fruit

satisfactorily, but the nuts fail to grow to proper size, fill poorly,

and may not mature before frost. At Davis there is an average length of

growing season of 242 days; the day temperatures are high, but the night

temperatures are comparatively low. Pecan trees are hardy even in

Connecticut, but the trees fail to bear because of the short growing

season and the great difference between day and night temperatures. The

pecan is truly a hot weather crop and is not suited for culture under

mountainous conditions. On the other hand it cannot be grown under

subtropical conditions because of insufficient cold during the winter to

meet the chilling requirement of the trees. Under such conditions, tree

growth starts very late in the spring, and, although the trees may

flower, few nuts may set and those that stick may be very poorly filled

at harvest if they mature.

The pecan is probably more exacting in regard to its climactic

requirements than are our other kinds of nuts, but the filbert or

hazlenut is probably a close second in this respect. The filbert,

however, represents the opposite extreme in that it does best under

conditions of mild winter and moderate summer temperatures. These

differences are pointed out for the reason that many amateur nut

growers want to grow certain nuts outside of their native range in

places where unsuitable climatic conditions prevail, and they cannot

understand why success is not possible.

+Growth and Fruiting Habit of Nut Trees+

Since the growth and fruiting habits of our different kinds of nut trees

are closely related, it is desirable to point out some of these

relationships. All of our different species of walnuts, the pecan and

all hickory nuts, as well as hazelnuts and filberts, are borne

terminally on shoots of the current season. In other words all walnut

species, pecan, and all hickory species bear the pistillate flowers that

develop into nuts at the terminal end of the shoots produced the same

year that the nuts mature. The staminate or pollen-producing flowers of

all these species arise from lateral buds on shoots that grew the

previous year. In the case of hazelnut and filbert the pistillate

flowers are borne in lateral buds on shoots of the previous season, as

are also the staminate flowers or catkins. In this case, however, the

pistillate flowers are formed and pollinated before the current year's

shoot growth is made. Almonds are borne laterally on shoots produced the

previous season. All chestnuts are borne laterally on shoots produced

the same season as the nuts.

The chestnut bears most of the staminate flowers separately in staminate

catkins whereas the pistillate flowers are in mixed catkins, but all are

formed laterally on shoots of the current season. The almond, which has

perfect flowers, produces these in lateral buds on shoots of the

previous year. Both the hazelnut and the almond flower before any

current-season growth is made, whereas all of the other kinds of nut

trees mentioned produce almost all normal shoot growth before flowering

occurs. These differences in growth, flowering, and fruiting habits

provide a basis for the explanation of why growth of almond trees, for

example, is harder to maintain than is that of walnut or pecan.

Flowering and early development of the fruit before shoot growth is made

tend to check such growth, so that flowering and fruiting trees will not

make as much new growth as they would have made had flowering and

fruiting been prevented.

In general, it can be stated that, in the case of bearing trees, the

longer the shoot growth and the greater its diameter in proportion to

length, the greater is the number of pistillate flowers that may be

formed at its terminal. Furthermore, the set of nuts and the size that

they attain are in proportion to the length and diameter of the shoots

bearing them. In other words, the number of flowers formed, the nuts

set, and the size that they attain are directly correlated with the

vigor and growth of the trees. As trees attain age, fewer long, strong

shoots and more short, weak shoots are formed. Hence the average size of

the nuts produced decreases because of the reduction in average shoot

growth. Furthermore, under normal conditions, the degree to which the

nuts are filled is related to the vigor as it is measured by the length

and diameter of the shoots bearing them. Strong, vigorous shoots usually

produce the best filled and earliest maturing nuts.

+What Is a Nut and of What Does It Consist?+

Webster gives a general definition of a nut as "a fruit consisting of a

kernel or seed enclosed in a hard woody or leathery shell that does not

open when ripe, as in the hazel, beech, oak, chestnut." Technically

speaking, it is a hard, indehiscent, one-seeded dry fruit resulting from

a compound ovary. In horticultural language the fruit consists of the

hard or leathery nut containing a kernel, together with the husk, hull,

or bur that surrounds the nut shell. This kernel consists of the embryo

plus the endosperm or its remains. In all of our important nuts, such as

walnuts, pecans, hickory nuts, almonds, and filberts, the kernel is

essentially the embryo with its thickened cotyledons or seed leaves, as

the endosperm has been absorbed except for a thin membrane.

At the beginning of its development, growth of the embryo is slow, and

in very early stages it is merely a rounded mass of cells. Later, the

meristems of the epicotyl (stem or top) and root axis develop, but the

whole embryo is still microscopic in size. Still later the cotyledons

(seed leaves) start development from the apical meristem and their

growth in length is rapid, but they are very thin and follow the

contours of the seed coat. Growth in length of the cotyledons may be

arrested by unfavorable nutritional conditions during the time of

elongation. In such case, the lobes of the cotyledons may not attain the

full length of the seed coat, or pellicle, which surrounds them. After

the cotyledons have attained full length, growth in thickness begins in

the area nearest the epicotyl and proceeds toward the margins. This

growth in thickness results from cambium-like meristem with the

formation of new cells. The formation of well developed or solid kernels

that completely fill the cavity within the shell is dependent upon

meristematic activity continuing almost to maturity. The weather

conditions, the nutrition of the tree, or other factors that affect the

synthesis and translocation of elaborated food materials from the leaves

and shoots to the kernels at this time determine the degree to which the

cotyledons are thickened, or in other words how well the nuts are

filled.

+Periods of Development+

In the development of the nuts there are three periods or stages: (1)

The period of growth in size; (2) the period of nut filling or

development of the kernel; (3) the period of maturing.

What takes place during these periods of development determines the size

the nuts attain, the degree to which they are filled, and finally the

quality at harvest. These three developmental stages are interdependent,

because the size of the nuts may affect the degree of filling, and that,

in turn, the time and nature of their maturity. They are not entirely

separate and distinct but overlap in that there is more or less

development of the kernel, varying with the species, while the nuts are

growing in size. In general, however, there is not appreciable kernel

development until after the nuts have attained approximately full size,

except in the chestnut.

The outstanding example of this situation is the pecan. There is

practically no growth of the kernel until after the shell of the nut has

started to become hard. At that time growth of the embryo, which

constitutes the kernel, become rapid. The major portion of the kernel is

formed during a period of approximately one month, starting at

Beltsville, Maryland about the middle of September. The final stages of

filling occur just before the nuts mature, and the first nuts to fall

usually have the best filled kernels. Later maturing nuts are generally

poorly filled; their shells and kernels are often discolored, and the

shucks fail to open properly, if at all.

The development of walnuts, hickory nuts, and filberts, so far as is

known, is in all essentials the same as that described for the pecan nut

except that the kernel or embryo begins to grow somewhat earlier in the

season. However, the major portion of the filling, which consists in the

thickening of the cotyledons, takes place late in the season, and only a

month or a little more before the nuts mature.

The period of the maturing of the nuts generally closely follows the

completion of the filling of the kernels. During this period in the

pecan, certain other species of hickory, the Persian walnut, chestnut,

and others, food reserves are transferred from shucks, hulls, or burs to

the nuts. Abscission layers are formed and shucks, hulls, or burs split

open on drying out, thus partially or wholly releasing the nuts. There

is a very direct relationship between the degree to which the nuts are

filled and their time of and normality of maturing; well filled nuts

mature early and normally, whereas poorly filled nuts mature late, if at

all, and shucks, hulls, or burs fail to open properly.

+Growth in Size+

The size of the nuts produced by a tree is determined by a number of

factors, one or all of which may operate during the course of the

season. These are: (1) Age of tree; (2) position of the nuts on the

tree; (3) fertility of the soil and moisture supply, or the nutritional

status of the tree; (4) size of the crop borne.

In general, old trees bear smaller nuts than do younger trees. Hence

size of nut for a particular variety is only relative. The first few

crops produced by a tree usually consist of nuts large in size for the

variety; and then, as the tree attains age, nuts become smaller in size.

Young trees make longer and thicker shoot growth than do older trees.

There is, then, under normal conditions, a direct relationship between

the growth made by a tree and the size that the nuts attain. The more

vigorous trees not only produce larger nuts than those produced by less

vigorous trees, but the hulls and shells of such nuts are thicker and

constitute a higher total percentage of the total weight of the fruit.

The position of the nuts on a tree has an important effect on the size

that they ultimately attain. In general, the nuts in the top are larger

than those nearer the ground; and those on the strongest and most

vigorous shoots of the top or lateral branches will attain a larger size

under normal conditions than those located on weaker and shorter shoots

or on the inside of the tree. Here again there is a direct relationship

between growth of the tree and growth in size of nuts. All normal trees

make longer and stronger shoot growth in the top than they do on the

terminals of lateral branches, and the shortest and weaker shoots as

well as the smallest nuts are generally on the lateral branches inside

of the tree top.

Fertility of soil and moisture supply determine in large measure both

the growth made by the tree and the size of nuts. The nuts borne on

trees growing on fertile soils adequately supplied with moisture are

generally much larger in size than those borne by trees on infertile

soil or soil poorly supplied with soil moisture. Deficiency of either

nitrogen, or moisture, or both is particularly effective in limiting the

size of nuts produced. Pecans grown under soil conditions in which both

nitrogen and moisture were deficient have been known to attain only

about one-fourth the size of nuts of the same varieties grown in the

same orchard but under conditions of clean cultivation and supplementary

nitrogen applications. A prolonged drought during the time that the nuts

are increasing in size very frequently causes them to be much smaller

than they would have been had the moisture supply been adequate.

The size of the crop borne by a tree determines in a very large measure

the size that the nuts attain at maturity. There is generally an inverse

relationship also between the number of nuts borne in a cluster on a

shoot and the size they attain. In this respect nut crops are little

different from apples and peaches, which, too, are sold on the basis of

size. In order to produce fruits of large size having a high market

value, the crops are thinned in years of a heavy set of fruit. In the

case of pecans, for example, thinning the crop at the time the nuts are

growing in size on heavily producing trees is a very effective method of

increasing the average size of the nuts allowed to remain on the trees.

The earlier the thinning is done the more effective it is; however, it

will increase the size of the nuts even when done as late as when the

shells have started to become hard. No practical and economical method

of thinning the crop of nuts has as yet been found; nevertheless it is

well to bear in mind that a large crop borne by a tree generally means

reduced average size of the nuts at harvest.

+Filling or Development of the Kernels+

In general, the fruits (nuts) of a nut-bearing tree are what might be

termed storage organs. In them are stored mineral elements and such

elaborated food materials as carbohydrates (sugars and starch), oil,

amino acids, and proteins that have been removed from the leaves and

wood of the tree. These materials are stored for future use of the

embryo in the nut to sustain respiration, to permit germination, and to

maintain the seedling until it has produced enough leaf area to become

self-sufficient.

The question may be asked, why is it so important that nuts be well

filled? The answer is very simple, because the quality of the oily nuts

is determined by how well the kernels are filled. All but one of our

most important nuts--almonds, filberts, hickory nuts, pecans, and

walnuts--are oily nuts; and well filled kernels contain from 50 to 75

percent or more of oil, depending upon the species. Chestnuts are

starchy nuts and contain less than one percent of oil. The relationship

between the degree of filling and the composition of the kernel in oily

nuts is outstanding, in that the better filled nuts have a higher

content of oil and a lower content of protein, carbohydrates, water, and

undetermined constituents than do poorly filled nuts. Highest quality of

the kernels is directly associated with highest oil content and highest

degree of filling. Nut kernels that are poorly filled are often hollow,

shrunken, shriveled, and chaffy. When eaten they may taste sweet, but

are lacking in the oily flavor characteristic of the particular species

of nut eaten. It is only in the best filled nuts that highest quality,

flavor, and oil content are found.

The degree to which nuts are filled or how well the kernels are

developed at harvest is determined by a rather large number of

interrelated factors: (1) Size of crop, or ratio of number of leaves per

nut; (2) average size of nuts; (3) condition of leaves; (4) amount of

second growth of the trees; (5) size of preceding crop and how well the

nuts produced were filled; (6) disease and insect injury to the nuts;

(7) weather conditions; (8) heterosis or effect of cross-pollination on

embryo size.

+Size of crop:+ Nut growers want their trees to bear large annual crops of

nuts. It is very seldom that one hears a nut grower express the opinion

that a certain tree is carrying too many nuts for the crop to attain

proper size and fill well, yet this is very often the case. Furthermore,

the production of a large crop of poorly filled nuts one year is almost

certain to result in a light crop or none at all the following year.

There is a very close inverse relation between the size of the crop

produced and the degree to which the nuts are filled at harvest, namely,

the larger the crop the less the nuts will be filled. It has been

pointed out above that nuts are storage organs, and the food materials

required to grow and fill them must be made in the leaves. When too many

nuts are set and carried through to the filling period, in proportion to

the number of leaves or the leaf area of the tree, it is not possible

for the leaves to synthesize the large amount of food materials required

to fill the nuts. In pecans, for example, it has been shown that six to

eight leaves are required normally to fill a nut properly and 10 or more

leaves per nut if the tree is to flower and set a crop the following

year. Other ratios for number of leaves or leaf area exist with other

kinds of nuts. It is general experience that large crops of nuts remove

such large amounts of food materials and minerals from the trees that a

light crop or no crop at all is produced the following year. This is

especially true if the nuts are not especially well filled in the "on

crop year."

+Size of nuts:+ Almost everyone prefers large nuts to small ones, and that

is one reason, why the larger sizes command a higher price on the

markets. Many remember how popular the McCallister hican was a number of

years ago because of its extremely large size. Such varieties of the

pecan as Nelson and Mahan were very popular because the nuts produced

were generally much larger than those of other varieties. These

varieties remained popular until experience in growing them showed that

they were very often poorly filled at harvest. As a general rule, large

nuts are more difficult to fill properly than small nuts. This is

obvious, because much more food material must be made by the leaves and

transported to fill the kernels of large nuts than is required to fill

an equal number of nuts of smaller size. In seasons with conditions

favorable for both tree growth and growth in size of the nuts, it is

often the experience that the nuts are poorly filled at harvest. On the

other hand, if the weather is dry during the period in which the nuts

are growing in size, they are much more likely to be well filled at

maturity. In fact, the writer has seen several instances in which,

because of severe drought in the spring, pecans were undersized, yet the

kernels developed and filled so well that the shells of the nuts cracked

at maturity.

+Condition of leaves:+ To produce well filled nuts, nut trees must bear a

large leaf area and the leaves must be in good health and vigor. If they

are to produce annual crops, the trees must carry their leaves until

cold weather in the late fall, undamaged by insects or diseases. The

importance of a large leaf area free from injury or abnormal condition

is so great that it can hardly be overemphasized in connection with nut

production. It can be definitely stated that under normal conditions the

size of the crop produced and the degree to which the nuts are filled is

directly related to the leaf area and the length of time it is carried

by the tree.

If the leaf area is to be large, the trees must make good, strong,

vigorous shoot growth, and this means that proper attention must be

given to fertilization to insure that the trees have adequate amounts

of nitrogen, potassium, magnesium, zinc, and boron, as well as all other

essential elements. The elements mentioned have been found most likely

to be deficient in the soils of eastern and southern United States. In

those regions their lack may be expected most frequently to limit tree

growth or the filling of the nuts because of their effects on the leaves

and the consequent inability of the leaves to make food materials.

Deficiency of one or more of these elements results in leaves that are

not able to make food materials in anywhere near such amounts as do

normal leaves well supplied with all essential elements. In severe

cases, deficiency of one or more of these elements results in chlorosis

of the leaves, still later in leaf scorch, and finally in premature leaf

fall. Trees having leaves in such condition cannot be expected to fill

the nuts borne by them.

Most nut trees grown about home or farmstead are deficient in nitrogen,

as the trees must compete with grass, weeds, shrubbery, or other trees.

Frequently there is not enough plant food for all. A deficiency of

nitrogen limits the growth and the leaf area carried by a tree. A

deficiency of potassium or magnesium very greatly limits the amount of

food material made by the leaves and hence greatly decreases the filling

and the oil content of the kernels. Zinc or boron deficiency has a

similar effect.

Hence, to insure the production of well filled nuts, one must be certain

that the trees are well fertilized and that the fertilizer elements

applied are in proper balance one with the others.

Injury to the leaves resulting from attacks by diseases and insects is

one of the most common and important causes of poorly filled nuts. Every

species and variety of tree nut suffers from at least one disease or

insect pest that damages the leaves and hence limits or curtails the

amount of elaborated food materials they can make. In most cases the

fungi or bacteria causing foliage diseases infect the leaves in early

spring at the time they are unfolding and growing in size, although the

infection may not be noticeable until later. These infected areas, even

though they are small and not numerous enough to cause the leaf to fall,

seriously impair the functioning of the leaf out of all proportion to

the area directly affected. Should the infection be so severe as to

cause premature defoliation, the damage will be great even though only a

small percentage of the leaves falls. The disease of eastern Mack walnut

known as leaf spot, or anthracnose, is one of these defoliating diseases

that causes untold damage from poorly filled nuts in the current crop

year, and results in a small crop or none at all the following year. The

development and spread of these diseases is gradual, and unsuspecting

growers do not realize the damage they cause.

On other hand, the injuries caused by such insects as the webworm, the

walnut caterpillar, the pecan leaf case-bearer, the Japanese beetle, and

others are somewhat spectacular in that the leaves may be partly or

completely consumed on portions of the trees. The injury caused by the

walnut aphis, the walnut lace bug, the pecan black aphis, and others, on

the other hand, is less conspicuous; but the end result is far more

serious than it usually is with the leaf eating insects, because the

damage caused is more widespread, almost all of the leaves on a tree

being affected. These sucking insects are small in size and may be

overlooked until premature defoliation takes place. If nut trees are to

bear satisfactory crops of well filled nuts, the diseases and insects

that attack and cause injury to the leaves must be controlled. Under

normal conditions the size of the crop produced, the regularity of

bearing, and the quality of the nuts harvested is proportional to the

leaf area of normal leaves carried by the tree from early spring until

freezing-weather in the fall.

+Second growth of the trees:+ Certain of our nut trees, such as pecan and

walnuts, under some conditions have two or perhaps more periods of shoot

growth during the same growing season. The first, or main period of

growth, starts at the time of foliation in the spring and ends soon

after the shoots flower. The second period of growth, if it occurs, may

begin any time after the nuts are set, and may end any time later. This

second growth seriously affects the filling of the nuts, in that food

materials are consumed in producing this second growth rather than in

the growth and filling of the nuts. Generally this second growth is not

made until late in the season, and it usually follows a period of dry

weather, when conditions again become favorable for growth. Usually this

is at the time the kernels should be developing, and hence the degree of

filling is affected. The seriousness of the effect on the filling of the

nuts is largely proportional to the amount and duration of this second

growth. A third period of growth may occur later if weather conditions

are suitable.

+Preceding crop:+ It has already been pointed out that nuts are storage

organs and in their growth and development large amounts of food

materials and minerals are removed from the tree. Under conditions of

heavy crop production, the reserves of these materials left in the tree

at the time of harvest are likely to be very low; and unless the trees

are growing on a fertile soil and carry their leaves until frost, these

reserves of minerals and elaborated food materials are not likely to be

restored. Under such conditions, in the following spring the reserves

are low and although there may be enough to initiate flowering and the

set of nuts, they are not sufficiently high to produce well filled nuts.

It is for this reason that the nuts produced in an "off crop year," even

though the crop may be much lighter, may be less well filled than those

produced in an "on crop year."

Such nuts as pecans, hickory nuts, and walnuts transfer large amounts of

potassium from the tree itself into the shucks or hulls. The kernels of

such nuts are high in nitrogen, phosphorus, and magnesium as well as in

oil, which is one of the most concentrated food materials and has the

highest calorie value. Nitrogen reserves in the trees are readily and

rather quickly replaced if adequate amounts are applied, as this element

is not fixed by the soil. This is not true of phosphorus and potassium,

as they are apparently taken up by the trees much more slowly than is

nitrogen. Furthermore, certain soils have a high fixing power for these

elements and hence they are slowly, if at all, available.

+Insect and disease damage to the nuts:+ Certain insects and diseases

attack the nuts, causing them to be poorly filled at harvest. Although

these pests may destroy, or cause a certain percentage of the crop to

drop before harvest, and hence serve as a thinning measure, the affected

nuts remaining on the tree may not be well filled at maturity. Examples

of such insects are the pecan or hickory shuck worm, the walnut husk

maggot, and the codling moth. Infestations by these insects occurring

before the shells of the nuts have become hard cause the nuts to drop.

However, infestations taking place after the nut shells have become hard

do not cause the nuts to drop. These late-infested nuts may be poorly

filled because the insect larvae mine the hulls or shucks, severing the

conducting tissues that transport food materials from the fruit stem or

peduncle through the shuck to the kernel. The damage caused not only

results in poorly filled nuts but also interferes with the natural

separation of the shucks or hulls from the shells.

Examples of diseases that attack the nuts and cause them to be poorly

filled at harvest are pecan scab and walnut bacteriosis. Pecan scab may

also attack other species of hickory. It is the most destructive pecan

disease, causing a high percentage of the nuts on highly susceptible

varieties to drop prematurely and those that stick to the tree to be

poorly filled at harvest. Walnut bacteriosis or blight is the most

important walnut disease in the West and unless controlled causes severe

losses from premature drop or from nuts both poorly filled and having

discolored kernels at harvest. It is obvious that if large crops of well

filled nuts are to be produced, these insects and diseases must be

controlled.

+Weather conditions:+ Many growers are inclined to blame the weather for

all small crops and poor nut quality because they realize it can have

such important effects. In reality its direct effects are generally much

less than they are thought to be, and its indirect effects are usually

much greater than is usually realized. Weather conditions have a very

great effect on the development of insects and diseases and on the

damage caused by them, so that most often these are of major importance.

It has already been pointed out that a prolonged drought may adversely

affect the size of nuts when it occurs while they are growing in size.

Similarly, the degree to which nuts are filled at harvest is affected by

the moisture supply during the filling period. A moisture deficiency

within the tree probably affects the translocation of food materials to

the nuts to a greater extent than it affects leaf functioning, for under

such conditions the leaves will withdraw so much water from the

developing nuts that the shucks and hulls become wilted. Under

conditions of prolonged drought the kernels do not fill properly,

maturity of the nuts is delayed, and the shucks or hulls do not open

normally.

Under drought conditions the temperatures of the air and of surfaces

exposed to the sun are often very high, and this sometimes results in

sun-scald or burning of the hulls or shucks. In severe cases the injury

extends through the hull or shuck to the shell and kernels. The

pellicle, or skin of the kernel, turns brown or amber color, as does the

portion of the kernel that has developed at the time of injury. Further

development of the affected portion of the kernel is arrested; and on

drying it becomes shriveled because of lack of filling. The greatest

amount of damage from sunburn occurs on the south and southwest sides of

the trees. Little can be done to prevent this type of injury other than

to grow good, strong, vigorous trees that bear a heavy dense foliage

that shades the nuts.

+Heterosis or hybrid vigor:+ The pistillate flowers of certain nut

species, such as the almond, chestnuts, and filberts, must be

cross-pollinated with pollen from another variety if satisfactorily

crops of well filled nuts are to be produced. These species are

self-sterile or self-unfruitful. On the other hand all walnut, pecan,

and hickory species are self-fertile and cross-fertile, but may be

self-unfruitful because of dichogamy, because they may shed their pollen

either before or after the stigmas of the pistillate flowers are

receptive to it. In all nut species cross-pollination is generally

recommended so as to assure a set of nuts. With cross-pollination a

better set of nuts is to be expected than with self-pollination, as well

as better filling of the kernels. It has recently been found that when

the pistillate flowers of a certain variety are cross-pollinated with a

pollen from another definite variety the embryo or nut kernel is larger

and better filled. This is a manifestation of hybrid vigor, or

heterosis. Heterosis has been found in the chestnut and in the pecan. It

likely will be found in other nut species. Some day the principles of

selected and controlled parentage underlying hybrid vigor may be

utilized in producing superior nuts, as these principals are now so

widely used in producing hybrid seed corn.

* * * * *

President Davidson: That paper was so extremely important that I

hesitated very much to stop it, but we are already at the point where we

should have adjourned. Now, unfortunately, we have some very important

things, I think, yet before us, but if the speakers can give their talks

from now on in the form of, shall we say, syntheses of the whole thing

and give us the conclusions rather than the details, it will be

appreciated by us all. Mr. Wilkinson is going to give us a very

important talk on what he has done with the propagation of the Lamb

curly walnut. Mr. Wilkinson.

The Grafted Curly Walnut as a Timber Tree

J. FORD WILKINSON, Rockport, Indiana

Our native trees are and have always been one of the most valuable

resources of this country, and one of the greatest heritages ever to

fall to a nation.

Wood has been used by our people since the landing of the Pilgrims, for

almost every comfort and purpose in life, from the making of cradles to

caskets.

Wood is still one of the principal materials in building homes and

furniture, and is used for railroad ties, for paper, and in so many

other ways that we could scarcely get along without wood.

The United States is the native home of many species of trees, of which

a number are superior in some certain ways for some special purposes.

The hickory has no equal for ax handles. As a building-timber where

strength and durability are needed the oak ranks among the first. Other

species are equally as important for some other uses.

Not to be overlooked are nut trees. They serve the twofold purpose of

producing both food for man and wild life, and valuable timber.

+Black Walnut Has Great Value+

Of the nut tree group, the black walnut is one of the most important. It

ranks among the first for lumber, furniture, cabinets, and finishing

material. It has no rival in use for gun stocks and airplane propellers;

as walnut wood is light, strong, will not get rough, but wears smoother

with use. Neither will it splinter when pierced by a bullet. Walnut wood

has been largely responsible, at times, for keeping us a nation of free

people.

The black walnut tree is an aristocrat of forest and field. It can

justly be proud, for no other tree can fill its place. As the late

author A. H. Marks said, "Who has not noticed the look of contended

usefulness which a nut-bearing tree wears? It is of use to the world and

knows it."

Walnuts, like other species of trees, are not all alike, either as to

nut production or in the grain of the wood.

+The Lamb Black Walnut+

Several years ago an unusually highly figured, and very valuable,

black walnut tree was discovered by Mr. George N. Lamb, then

Secretary-Treasurer of the American Walnut Manufacturers Association of

Chicago, Illinois.

When the logs from this tree came into the mill, and their value was

realized, Mr. Lamb went to the place where the tree had grown. He

secured some twigs from the branches of this top and sent these, as I

have been informed, to Dr. Robert T. Morris and Mr. Willard G. Bixby,

knowing of their interest in propagating better varieties of nut trees.

This wood had been taken from the top many days after the tree was

felled, and so was dry and nearly dead. I believe Dr. Morris succeeded

in getting only one graft to grow, and Mr. Bixby two. This variety was

then named in honor of Mr. Lamb.

Several years later Mr. Bixby sent me a very small stick of graft wood

from one of his trees, from which I made two grafts. One of them grew,

giving me a start of this variety. I have annually propagated a few

trees of it ever since, though with little encouragement, and even much

discouragement from others, including State and U. S. Government

authorities.

On one occasion I thought I practically had an order for a quantity of

these Lamb walnut trees for a reforestation project. However, the

prospective purchaser, before placing his final order, wrote to

government authorities, then wrote me as follows:

* * * * *

" ... Sept. 30, 1940 ...

"Following some investigation in connection with the so-called curly

walnut varieties, we have been advised by government authorities that

these trees do not form, or grow into, a curly walnut tree at any time

during the growing stage.

"We took it for granted that the wood formation would be of a curly

nature, and for that reason we were interested in that particular

variety.

"In view of this information which we have concerning these trees, we

would not be interested in growing them as we have plenty of native

black walnut here...."

* * * * *

This and other discouragements, from both government authorities and

individuals, had about as much effect on me as King George's advice to

the American people not to use tobacco; they smoked calmly on, and I

continued to propagate Lamb curly black walnut trees.

I have been propagating nut trees since 1910, and have never yet known

one of my propagated nut trees to fail to carry the characteristics of

the parent tree, as to habits of growth, bark, bud formation, foliage,

texture of wood, or quality of nuts. The Deming Purple walnut tree, when

asexually propagated, reproduces the purple wood, so I reasoned the Lamb

variety would reproduce figured wood. Nature seldom blunders.

+Value of Original Lamb Walnut Tree+

When I was in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a few years ago, doing some tree

work for the late William J. Wallace, he took me a few miles to the

location of the original Lamb tree. It was near a small river in a

gravel loam soil near Ada, Kent County, Michigan.

The following is an extract of a letter received from Mr. Lamb as to the

original tree:

"November 27, 1929

Lamb Figured Walnut--

Cut into veneers @ 6 to 18c per sq. ft. (1/28")

Use: Furniture

Amount of veneers 60627' [Value: $8,637.62 to $10,918.86 (Prewar!)--Ed.]

Logs produced:

8' x 21"--144 Log Ft.

6' x 18"-- 73 " "

10' x 36"--640 " "

14' x 30"--591 " "

10' x 32"--490 " "

Stump --500 " "

_____

2438

Location of tree--Ada, Kent County, Michigan.

Location--River flat 20 rods from river.

Soil-Gravel loam.

Type of tree--Open grown.

Shape---Double stump.

Height--40 ft.

Figure--Throughout the tree."

Mr. Lamb further states in his letter: "Unquestionably it was one of the

most thoroughly figured trees ever discovered, and if figured wood will

propagate itself this stock should, certainly should, do so."

He further states, "The figure in this tree was quite apparent, even in

the small branches, while the Forest Products Laboratory found evidence

of a developing figure in the twigs not over five years old."

The wood specimens I now have on exhibit here were taken from one of my

12-year-old grafted trees that I cut, and in them you will find figure

visible to the naked eye, or easily noticeable by touching with a

finger, in wood from branches not over 7 years old.

Comparing age at which figure shows in the wood of the two trees, this

young tree seems to be developing figure at an early age, as in the

parent tree.

My confidence in this outcome had never been shaken by the doubts of

others. Few seemed to share this belief with me, and for this reason I

have never pushed the sale of Lamb trees. Now I do not hesitate to state

that curly figure will reproduce in any propagated Lamb trees, as the

evidence before you here is stronger than any argument.

One purpose of the Northern Nut Growers Association is to encourage the

perpetuation by propagation of the better varieties of nut trees. I

consider the Lamb variety one of the best walnut trees known from a

timber point of view, and until a better variety is found I shall

continue to propagate Lamb black walnut trees.

+Ed. note:+ The nuts on Lamb trees, as seen at Norris, Tennessee, during

this meeting, appear to be of at least average size and have better

than average shell structure. They probably would be well adapted to

machine-cracking. Thus the Lamb would not be a bad variety to grow for

its nuts. Or we could double-work the trees, to have each tree with a

good trunk of the Lamb wood growing beneath a fruiting top of any

desired walnut variety. One or two of our members already have made a

start on this latter scheme of propagation.

+Author's Note:+ The Lamb variety is a rapid and upright grower and should

be well adapted as a stock for the purpose suggested.

* * * * *

President Davidson: I don't think one can minimize the importance of

what Mr. Wilkinson has done with the Lamb curly walnut. There are

possibilities here that are of immense value to those who are interested

in timber. Now, I am very, very sorry to put off the rest of this

program until this afternoon. Possibly we can work a part of it then.

Meantime, we had better adjourn.

Mr. Chase says that he has arranged for a group picture to be taken at

the Community Building at one o'clock. Let's everyone be there at one

o'clock. That means, of course, that you are going to cut the sandwich

and coffee pretty short.

All right, let's adjourn.

(Luncheon recess was taken.)

+Tuesday Afternoon Session+

President Davidson: Come to order, please. The first speaker on the

afternoon program is Mr. Shivery. I think I will get Mr. Chase to say a

word.

Mr. Chase: Our next speaker is Mr. George Shivery, Extension Forester

for the University of Tennessee, and I know that the interest of this

Association is in the planting of improved black walnuts, and I simply

can say this man arranged for the planting of more Thomas walnut trees

than any other man in the world. George Shivery.

The Black Walnut Situation in Tennessee

GEORGE B. SHIVERY, Extension Forester, University of Tennessee,

Knoxville, Tennessee.

Mr. Shivery: Mr. Chairman and members of the Association: I certainly

appreciate that compliment made by Mr. Chase, and I want to assure all

of you that we certainly are interested in the black walnut in

Tennessee. In the past we have had to depend pretty much on the wild

black walnut, and we will for years in the future. But we have done

everything possible to get distribution on this Thomas improved black

walnut which has been propagated here through the efforts of Mr. Chase,

Mr. Zarger and other members in his division.

It seems to me that this black walnut kernel industry is sort of a

tradition, particularly in East Tennessee. If you have lived in this

state as long as I have, you have become curious about its history.

Well, in the early days there were no railroads in this state, and

commerce moved pretty much by means of wagon team, and the supply center

seemed to be Baltimore, Maryland. Now, I can visualize very well that

on outbound trips they doubtless carried black walnut kernels, and on

the way in, of course, they'd bring clothing and other materials that

were not produced here at home.

In the early days they produced tremendous amounts of maple sugar and

maple syrup. Doubtless this was consumed at home and nowadays we don't

have any evidence of that, because the climatic conditions in New York

State and other northern states and New England are much better suited

to the flow of the sap. The weather, I believe, is not so changeable up

there. Our weather is changeable. We may have a very severe cold week,

and then in ten days it will be balmy and pretty weather. We haven't

made any effort to bring back the sugar maple industry. We don't

consider it economic in this state, because cane sugar in the past has

been cheap in price, and then we have another product that some of you

may not be familiar with, sorghum molasses. That serves as dessert lots

of times in many meals, hot biscuits and sorghum to finish up the meal.

Now, I might mention something about the size of the black walnut

industry in this state. We estimate that there are eight million pounds

of uncracked whole walnuts produced on the average in a normal crop year

in Tennessee, and there is another five million pounds that is never

gathered, never hulled, never enters the market, never used, and the

value of this crop in a normal year would be around $750,000. That is

for the nuts, the fruit, the kernels. If you speak of timber it will

amount to $960,000. That is in the form of lumber and veneers, and if

you figure that in the form of a log at the shipping point, we'd reduce

that figure and say it would be $480,000.

I think to understand this state you have to give some consideration to

physiographic regions, and if you will bear with me I'd like to sketch

through these regions of the state, because they have a bearing on

production of black walnut. Here in the east we have the East Tennessee

Mountains, and proceeding westward we have the Great Valley of East

Tennessee. It goes all the way down to Chattanooga, up through Bristol,

on up through Virginia to Hagerstown, Maryland, all the way up to

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

We have fine soil, and we also have different kinds of shale in that

valley. Then we proceed westward. We come to the Cumberland Plateau, and

the elevation of this plateau is around 2,000 feet. It is higher than

this valley. Then we cross that and we reach this area (indicating on

map). That is what we call the Highland Rim. That is made up of

limestone soil of a different character, usually, than that in this East

Tennessee valley. That is what we term the Eastern Highland Rim, and

this around here (indicating) we term the Western Highland Rim. And this

red portion would be the Central Basin in which Nashville is situated.

Then you would travel through this central elevation, come up on the

Western Highland Rim, and then you come up here and you cross the

Tennessee River flowing north. Then you get into West Tennessee.

Now, that is coastal plain soil, and as you approach the Mississippi

River here you have a covering of what the Germans call loess, fine,

wind-blown material, silt loam. So that very sketchily gives you some

idea of the physiographic regions in this state.

Now you want to know where these black walnuts are grown. Well, up about

here (indicating the northeast) we have the towns of Greeneville and

Rogersville and Morristown and Jonesboro, the counties of Washington

County, Greene County, Hawkins County, say, ten counties; radiating

around those ten counties you have in the past had great quantities of

walnut kernels produced and sold. Now, go on down this valley past

Knoxville, and McMinn County (southeast) has some years produced heavy

crops of walnuts. So you have heavy production all through the valley.

There's another center, we might term it, of about six counties in this

central basin. But I don't want you to get the wrong impression, because

walnuts grow in almost any county in this state, but I am mentioning

these greater producing areas. And this County of Williamson south of

Nashville in years past has sent plenty of walnuts to market. So that's

a walnut producing area. And up here in this Highland Rim we have some

counties by the name of Pickett and Overton and Clay County. Well, they

produce walnuts, and the people up there have in the past cracked out a

lot of walnuts. And in Montgomery County they produce walnuts. So the

normal trade centers where these walnuts move is really to a great

degree here at this town of Morristown in East Tennessee, and Nashville

in Middle Tennessee, and this Middle Tennessee center draws from

Kentucky. In fact, these four or five large shelling concerns know about

the walnuts pretty much all over the entire walnut producing territory.

Through the years the Agricultural Extension Service, University of

Tennessee, with which I am connected, has been keenly interested in

assisting in any way we can to get additional income out of walnut

kernels, and in recent years the whole uncracked walnut. And even though

I am a forester I can see the possibilities of this, and we like to

carry it along. In fact, I consider walnut as kind of a dual-purpose

tree, fine for timber production, also for production of nuts, walnut

meats or kernels. You might term it a triple-purpose tree. I don't think

there is any better tree than that for a shade tree in pastures, in the

field, and around the home, because for one reason it makes what we term

in this state a "cold shade," and it is not a hot shade like you get

under a sugar maple. The maple has a dense foliage. And as Mr. Chance

indicated this morning, walnut is usually associated with blue grass.

Blue grass will grow under it.

I guess some of you here remember the years of the depression, and I

remember in 1932, for example, we had a heavy crop of black walnuts in

the state. Then I believe the price for kernels of 15 cents a pound

would have been a good price during that year, and some of them probably

sold for less. So if we had the time we would follow through all the

years, beginning with 1927, but just to make it as brief as possible, I

will leave those out, but I would like to mention the year 1941. It sort

of disrupted things in the kernel industry, because at that time the

Pure Food and Drug people came in here and set up regulations, and it

interfered with the merchandising of these kernels, because the producer

had to satisfy certain sanitary regulations, and it really sounded worse

than it was. Anyway, it confused our people, and probably that is about

the year in which we had this big shift from the production of walnut

kernels cracked out at home to a sale of uncracked walnuts to these

shelling plants.

Then another year that I think of (we always think of these as walnut

crop years) was 1945, and that year we got better prices, probably, than

ever before or since, and a lot of our country people were able to sell

hulled uncracked walnuts as high as $6 per hundred pounds.

We will continue to be interested in this industry, but, of course,

nowadays the wage scale is higher and money is not worth as much as it

was in the past, so it really seems to me that in order to get out this

crop we just have to try to make the price a little more attractive.

* * * * *

President Davidson: "We are now going to hear from Mr. Shessler of Ohio,

on his method of grafting, and I wish to assure you that he knows what

he is talking about. He has done a lot of it.

Grafting Walnuts in Ohio

SYLVESTER SHESSLER, Genoa, Ohio

In 1934 the Ohio Nut Growers Association conducted a black walnut nut

contest. I read about it in the _Ohio Farmer_. As soon as the names of

the winners appeared in that publication, each owner was contacted for

some nuts from the prize winning trees. Answers were received from nine

of the 10 winners. I did not receive nuts from the Hoover tree. The

Brown nuts I planted came up in 1935 and the trees are now 22 feet high,

with spread of 22 feet, and are 27 Inches in circumference. The Tritten

prize nuts were planted in a fence row. These did not come up the first

year. The next year I plowed and disked the patch of ground and planted

potatoes. To my surprise the Tritten seedlings came up with the

potatoes. I let them grow and I now have five trees from these nuts. All

of these trees produce nuts which resemble the original Tritten nut and

have good cracking quality. One in particular fills out nicely, has a

very thin hull, and is a little larger than the original Tritten. I have

named it the Shessler. The Brown seedling trees also produce good nuts.

The seedling trees from the Cowle nuts produce nuts with rough shells.

Following my nut planting project I began to collect scions from all of

the original trees. Mr. Homer Jacobs, of Kent, Ohio, supplied me with

scions from the Tritten tree. The next year Mr. Jacobs asked me to send

him scions from the Brown tree as he intended to bench-graft some. I

have planted nuts along a road 80 rods long, so that I could have many

stocks to top-work. I began to graft in 1935, using the seedling trees

as stock. I now have 200 seedling black walnut trees, 100 grafted black

walnut trees, 25 grafted Persian walnuts, 20 chestnut trees, two

"buartnuts," 15 heartnuts, six pecans, one butternut, 20 grafted hickory

trees and five persimmons. Some of these trees are planted in orchard

form, others are scattered along fence rows.

For grafting, I cut scions so that there is about four inches of

two-year-old wood at the base and some one-year-old wood with small

matured buds. These small buds will grow, as a rule. The scions are kept

in damp sawdust until used. I like the stock to be a half to one inch in

diameter. I wait until the trees are in full leaf before I graft. After

leafing out the stock does not bleed. If I find that the stock is

bleeding hard when I cut back, I wait a few days before grafting. It is

a waste of time to graft when the stock is bleeding. I have grafted very

early when the bark would not bleed at all. I just dug down into the

cambium layer and put in the scion. I tried one Persian and three black

walnuts like this and all grew. I use the slot bark method of grafting,

as described in Mr. Reed's bulletin [U.S.D.A. Farmers Bull. 1501]. The

stock is cut straight across and I put the lower bud just above the

bark on the outside. I roughen the bark of the scion that fits just

behind the bark of the stock. A small nail is pushed through the bark

and scion with the handle of my knife. I generally tie with cord but

sometimes when the bark is heavy I do not use cord. A two-pound paper

sack with a hole on the earth side is placed over the graft and the sack

is tied at the bottom. This serves as a "hot house" and protects the

scion from rain. As soon as leaves appear on the scion, the sack is

removed and all the new sprouts are broken off below the graft. I put

only one scion on each graft. I use Beck's cold wax. It is easy to thin

with water and I just flatten a stick for my brush. I never wax the bud

but wax scion well on top.

I cannot give an accurate count of my grafting success but estimate that

75 percent of my grafts live. Rather than keep records I use that time

to graft more trees. I am not an experimenter--I simply like to have

grafted nut trees. My own trees are scattered over a two-mile area. I

have grafted trees in Toledo and Grand Rapids. Every Sunday I attend

church, then in the afternoon I graft trees. My aim is to try all the

promising trees and select the best and weed out the poor ones. I am

saving only the trees that bear nuts every year.

In 1947, I grafted the Ohio 1946 prize winning black walnuts. I achieved

survival on all except Nos. 5 and 8. The scionwood of these two was in

poor condition and I did not think they would live. I also have No. 54

which looks promising to me. I am looking forward to other contests in

Ohio and elsewhere so that we can uncover some more superior black

walnuts.

* * * * *

President Davidson: Thank you, Mr. Shessler.

Mr. Slate, will you say a word to us on grafting? That's right along the

same line.

Grafting Walnuts in the Greenhouse

GEORGE L. SLATE, State Experiment Station, Geneva, N. Y.

Walnuts have been grafted in pots in the greenhouse at the Experiment

Station at Geneva, N. Y. for a dozen years or more and the practice is

successful and very useful. This method was adopted for two reasons.

First: Under field conditions results are often uncertain, owing to the

vagaries of the weather or neglect at a critical time. The inexpertness

of the operator made it desirable that the work be done under as

favorable conditions as possible, with the hope that a favorable

environment might overcome in part the lack of skill. Second: The work

can be done in March before the field work begins, whereas field

grafting in May would often not get done owing to the pressure of other

work at that time. This method is not original with the writer, but is

similar to the method used at the East Malling Research Station in

England and described by Witt in 1928 [1].

The rootstocks, two year old black walnut seedlings raised from nuts

planted in the nursery, are dug in the fall, stored in the nursery

cellar until late February or early March, at which time they are potted

in six or eight inch pots, depending upon the size of the rootstocks.

The roots are cut back so that the plant will fit in the pot. At this

time the tops are cut off, leaving the stem about 8 inches high. The

pots are placed in a warm house, watered as needed, and in about 10 days

the buds begin to break.

The Jones modified cleft graft is used. The stub is cut off at grafting

time and the cleft is made by cutting, not splitting, the stock with a

large grafting knife. The scion is tied in place with nursery tape,

half-inch size, with a short wick leading out of the cleft. The scion is

painted with grafting wax.

+Care of the Grafted Plant+

The pot is set in a propagating frame about 18 inches deep, with bottom

heat, and covered with glass, plus lath or cloth shade. An inch of peat

in the bottom of the frame is desirable, to hold moisture and maintain

high humidity. The temperature of the frame is kept in the eighties, but

is not allowed to go above 90 deg.F. Under these conditions of warmth and

high humidity, growth activity is rapid and in about two weeks the buds

break, although, some may not start for a month. This spring

adventitious buds developed on several scions. Many suckers arise from

below the graft, and these are rubbed off two or three times a week. As

soon as the shoots from the scion are two or three inches long the

plants may be removed to a cooler house, where there is less danger of

overheating on hot spring days. Later, they go to the cold frame for

hardening off, and when danger of frost is over after May 21st, they are

set in the nursery for two years. First year growth is not over eight or

ten inches, but the second year the plants grow to three or four feet or

even more in a favorable season.

The percentage of grafts starting depends largely on the scion wood.

Wood cut from vigorous young trees which is grafted the same day will

give a 90 percent stand or better, but wood from other sources varies

according, to the age and vigor of the tree from which it is cut and the

percentage of success may be much less.

This method is useful for small scale operations where a greenhouse is

available and it is desirable to do the grafting before outside work

interferes with it. For one not skilled in nut tree grafting success is

probably more certain than with nursery grafting.

+Literature Cited+

1 Witt, A. W. The vegetative propagation of walnuts. Ann. Rpt. of the

East Malling Research Station 14th and 15th Yrs. 1926-1927 II Supplement

pp. 60-64.

* * * * *

President Davidson: There are plenty of us who don't know much about

grafting, and I did want you to hear Mr. Slate's method. It is certainly

worth trying and would come at a pleasant time of the year, would be

easy to do, and any of us could try it out.

We now should like to hear from Mr. Clarke on Nut Investigations at

Pennsylvania State College.

Nut Investigations at the Pennsylvania State College

WILLIAM S. CLARKE, JR., State College, Pennsylvania

Our present work in nut growing at the Pennsylvania State College was

begun in 1946. Some work had been started many years ago, and a small

number of trees were planted, mostly black walnut; but a site was

selected which proved to be very cold and frosty, and most of the trees

soon died. Further work had been planned at a later date, but the

depression and lack of labor and land prevented us from getting under

way then.

When the present project in nut growing was approved, the country was

just beginning to recover from the recent war, and materials of most

kinds, including nut trees, were very difficult to obtain. Therefore, in

order to learn as much as possible about nut trees, we started at the

beginning, with the seed. About two bushels of hulled black walnuts were

collected from fence-row trees; some were planted out in the ground that

autumn, and some were placed in soil in a box and kept over winter on

the outdoor porch of the packing house. Some hickory and pecan nuts were

bought and also stored in a similar box. The only nuts which grew were

those planted out in the ground. They gave us a good germination, while

not a single nut stored in the boxes grew.

At the present time we have about 200 black walnut seedlings in the

nursery. When they are a year or two older, they will be grafted to

several of the named varieties of black walnuts, and those that take

will be planted out in a nut orchard. These seedling trees were

transplanted after one year's growth. About four or five times as much

of the walnut plant was underground in the root as grew above ground

where we could see it.

Since the first year's work we have made a few purchases, and planted a

few more nut seeds. At the present time we have planted five pairs of

named varieties of filberts, four Chinese chestnuts, of which three

survive, four Persian walnuts, three of which survive, and two Japanese

walnuts. We also have a few seedlings of Turkish tree hazel obtained

from nuts sent to us by one of our friends in the state of Washington

and a few butternut seedlings grown from nuts of a tree on the college

campus.

Future plans include an orchard with many of the named varieties of

black walnuts and also, we hope, some of the new hardy strains and

selections of the Persian walnut being introduced by the United States

Department of Agriculture. Representative specimens of a wide range of

nut species will be collected. Some further work on chestnuts and

filberts may be attempted if they prove to be hardy here. Plans for the

more distant future include studies in soil fertilization and in

spraying for disease and insect control.

+Cold Injury in 1947-48+

This past winter has been very hard on nut trees, and on some other

trees as well. In the first place, the cold weather of the autumn began

very suddenly after six weeks of uninterrupted warm weather without any

cool nights to harden the wood. In late September a few days of cool

weather came, and then three nights in five with temperatures near 20 deg..

The walnut foliage and some of the youngest wood turned black. Next came

a winter with extremely low temperatures, with the minima ranging from

18 to 23 degrees below zero over our orchard land. Our four Persian

walnut trees were killed back to the ground; three of them have sprouted

this summer from the roots. Considerable leaf bud killing occurred on

Chinese chestnut. One Japanese walnut died back to the ground and has

sprouted from the roots. The other tree lost most of its younger wood,

but some buds near the base of last season's growth have sprouted out to

make a new top. Several specimens of the golden chinkapin

(_Castanopsis_) of the Pacific Coast, which had made one year's growth

here, were killed outright.

Most of the terminal buds and youngest wood of our nursery trees of

black walnut were killed, but the trees have grown well this year from

the lateral buds. In the woods some black walnuts which had been cut

down about four or five years ago, and which had made sprout growth now

about fifteen feet high, were killed back from two to four feet by the

winter. A twenty-year-old Stabler black walnut on our lawn lost many of

its top limbs, though the lower limbs survived the winter all right.

Some other types of trees were also badly damaged: some locust trees

were killed to the ground, and many others were killed to very old wood.

A ginkgo tree on our lawn was killed back to the main trunk. This was

one of the few times that I have ever seen injury on this species.

One of the five named varieties of filberts, Pal, escaped winter injury.

DuChilly and Italian Red each have one good tree and one that was killed

back to the ground, but is now sprouting from the roots. Of Medium Long,

both trees have been killed way back. One tree of Cosford was killed

completely, and the other tree has been badly damaged.

* * * * *

President Davidson: Thank you, Mr. Clarke. Our family stopped on the way

at a shelling plant where they were handling nuts by the ton, not the

bushel, just the ton. I am not exaggerating. You have all heard the

hill-billy program from Renfro Valley, no doubt, and we have with us

today the man who is running that cracking plant and also this

hill-billy chorus, Tom Mullins, who will tell us about what he is doing

down at Renfro Valley.

Black Walnuts: A New Specialty at Renfro Valley

TOM MULLINS, Renfro Valley, Kentucky

Mr. Mullins: As Mr. Davidson said, I come from a little hill-billy

section up in Kentucky known as Renfro Valley. Up until about a year ago

the main commodity there was hill-billy music and a lot of noise on

Saturday night. About last August our boss there kind of got interested

in black walnuts. There were a lot of them going to waste all over the

county due to the fact that most of our locals up there are kind of

lazy. They don't like to get up there and stomp them out.

His original idea was to set up a hulling plant and hull the nuts and

then buy the walnuts from the locals after they were dried. One thing

led to another, and we talked to Mr. McCauley there, and Dad bought a

big walnut plant to process black walnuts all the way through. He was

new to it and so was I. He said, "Let's buy a million pounds of black

walnuts." I didn't any more know what a million pounds of black walnuts

was than I know how many grains of sand is in three or four buckets. It

didn't take me very long, I think it was 31 days, and I bought 1,030,000

pounds. That's a whole lot of walnuts in anybody's language.

One of the local boys on our radio program came up with the bright idea

that before in Renfro Valley we used to be just half nuts; now we are

walnuts.

We started cracking these things along about the 15th of October, and

last Saturday we cracked our last 10,000 pounds. Our machine is capable

of cracking approximately 10,000 pounds in an 8-hour shift, and we carry

the walnut all the way through to remove any of the field litter that it

may have when it is picked up, and through cleaning air blasts and into

a cracking machine that does darn near all the work. The only thing we

haven't been able to figure out yet is how to get this machine to tell a

bad kernel from a good one. We have to leave that to some of the girls

who do the work on the picking belts.

Our future plan for this fall is to buy a million and a half pounds this

year and process them. I believe one of these gentlemen a while ago

mentioned something about the pure food laws. They are pretty rough on

us. We have to pasteurize our walnuts. The state law of Kentucky

requires 190 degrees of heat for an hour and a half. That's a lot of

heat.

We package our nuts in two-ounce packages and in 35 and 50-pound cartons

for the wholesale trade.

That has created quite a little industry there in our county. We have

one county there, Clark County--Winchester, Kentucky, is the county seat

of it--and out of that one county last year alone I bought 800,000

pounds of walnuts. That was, walnuts in the hull that the farmer had

picked up and brought to us in trucks.

Our success was not too great in this method of hulling green walnuts to

get our supply. We weren't adequately fixed up to dry the walnuts and

take care of them in storage. We lost a few of them that way, but I

think this year we have a little better sense and will let the farmer

stomp them out.

We are working now on an educational program, both newspaper and radio,

to persuade the farmers in our locality to let their walnut trees grow.

We tell them nearly all the walnut trees will produce enough kernels or

shelled walnuts to bring in as much money as they would if cut down and

taken to the mill and used for saw logs. That is our main problem now,

to try to keep the black walnut industry working there in our community.

And our future plans call for plantings of black walnut seedlings and

convincing the farmer and the 4-H Club members and all the boys in the

Future Farmers of America and organizations like that to protect and

cultivate their black walnut trees.

I am kind of on the fence this year. I stuck my neck away out the other

day and bought a farm. After checking the farm I found I had about 600

walnut trees. Now, then, I am hollering on one hand for an increase in

prices of raw material, and as a sheller I am hollering on the other

hand to get the prices down. But I believe as a producer for next year I

am going to try to forget about the shelling and let the prices go to

the devil.

Mr. McDaniel: Would you mind telling us what you had to pay for the

walnuts in the shell?

Mr. Mullins: Our average last year was $4.33. We went as high as $4.80.

Some of those we bought hurriedly--

President Davidson: In the hull?

Mr. Mullins: No, that's dry shell. Our walnuts in the hull we paid a

dollar and a quarter a hundred for, and if we had had good success we'd

have made some money on it at that angle.

There is one question I'd like to put before you gentlemen. Maybe some

of you know a little something about it. I was reading an article not

long ago in Popular Mechanics Magazine about some plant on the West

Coast that is developing the Vitamin C content of the walnut hull

itself. It is very high, the Vitamin C content in the walnut hull.

Another thing we did last year. After we hulled all of these walnuts we

had a mess of hulls on hand, and our farmers were a little reluctant to

come and get them. We tried to talk them into using them for fertilizer.

They are kind of like some of the boys, they have got to be shown. They

have to see somebody else do it before they tackle it.

Out of curiosity I laid my garden off and divided it in half, and on one

half I put a top dressing of these dried-out, pulverized walnut hulls,

and I firmly believe that the side that had the walnut hulls on it

produced twice as much. And some of the boys in the neighborhood kind of

noticed what kind of garden I had, and we don't have any hull problem

anymore. They carried them all off.

Same way with the shells. We tried to get them to haul the shells off to

use them on the fields for tobacco land and to grow blue grass, and they

found out that was pretty good, so they are bothering us now about our

shells.

We have another by-product. It is too small a granule kernel to go

through, and we can't remove the shell from it. We have tried that out

on chickens and hogs and some other farm animals, turkeys, ducks and

geese. One boy that works for me there in the cracking plant had 28

hens. He had them in a pen, and he was getting six and eight eggs a day.

So I talked him into taking some of these granules home and feeding them

to his chickens, and in two weeks his 28 hens were producing 20 to 24

eggs a day. That kind of settled that problem, too. Some of the boys

kind of got an idea they'd like to have some of that.

A lot of you folks are here from the North, and you possibly would be

going back along Highway 25 going home, and I'd like to extend an

invitation now to stop off tomorrow or the next day and look over our

plant. It's quite interesting, quite a complicated piece of machinery.

Mr. McCauley at Chicago is the gentleman who designed the machine, and

he will have something to say about it.

One of the local farmers came in to see that machine one day, and it was

operating, just batting the kernels out right and left. He looked up at

it, gandered it all over, and I asked him what he thought it was. He

said, "It's a damn lie. That thing can't do it."

So come see us.

* * * * *

President Davidson: Thank you, Mr. Mullins. Next, Marketing Black Walnut

Kernels. This fits in with what Mr. Mullins has said. Mr. McCauley from

Chicago will tell us about it. Mr. McCauley.

Marketing Black Walnut Kernels

F. J. McCAULEY, McCauley Company, Chicago, Illinois

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen: Tom has got me on the spot here. I

came here to speak to you about the marketing of black walnuts.

Machinery is a hobby of mine, and that thing there was just one of those

off-shoots of an infertile brain. But Tom is having a lot of trouble,

and a lot of fun with it, so if you people would like to see that

machine, that particular machine, I am glad that he invited you up

there. It may give you a little different idea of what the sheller is up

against in the salvaging of black walnut kernels.

You are interested in growing the black walnuts and other nuts in the

shell, but they do have to be prepared for the public, and Tom's job,

and other people's that are in the shelling business, is getting them

out. The machines are made at Knoxville, Tennessee, and you can get a

fairly decent idea about the shelling of black walnuts from the machine

Smalley has. Tom's is a much larger size.

Now we will get down to this thing I came here to talk to you about, the

marketing of black walnuts. My speech is divided into three parts; the

first is about nuts, the second is about nuts and the third is about

nuts, and I am nuts. Yes, that's more true than you think. My nickname

throughout the United States is "Nuts" McCauley, and I am proud of it.

It is a good nickname to have for a man that's in the nut business. And

I most certainly am in the nut business, machinery on one hand and the

selling of various types of nut kernels on the other.

You people probably don't know it, but you have the best advertised nut

in the United States that you are working with, black walnuts. There are

very few people in the United States that don't know what a black walnut

kernel is, or a black walnut. In fact, I would say that 75 per cent of

them at some time or other have gathered black walnuts, have hulled

them. You know those pretty stained hands you have, and I can remember

back in those days when I was a kid when I used to get those hands of

mine just so brown and black from the hulling of black walnuts that my

mother would almost want to turn me over her knee and spank me. But when

wintertime came I always had a bunch of black walnuts that we could sit

down and crack and put in those cookies or in that fudge.

I have talked to a good many of you people here, and I have a prepared

speech, but I am going to ramble a little bit and I am going to ask you

to ask me questions, because I found out that I don't know so many

things, or the speech that I was going to make to you might not be as

interesting as your asking me questions. I do want to say a few things,

and I will go through quickly.

The first is the marketing of black walnuts in the shell. We find in the

marketing of any product that there is a tremendous amount of waste due

to poor sacking, due to a little dishonesty on the part of the people

who are selling merchandise. You know, if there is a brick in a bag, the

brick weighs a pound, that costs the man who buys the black walnuts

money. In other words, out of that pound of brick he intended to get a

small quantity of meats to sell, so his cost immediately goes up. You'd

be surprised at how many bricks and how much iron there is in black

walnuts and pecans! It's universal throughout the United States. There

is a lot of chiseling that goes on. Your bags should be good. Black

walnuts must be held for some time before they are processed, and one

black walnut bag used one year can't be used another. If you can get by

with one year's use of a bag to hold a hundred pounds, or whatever is

put in it, of black walnuts, you are very fortunate. Usually they break

out before the year is over, and that causes waste. So start out with a

decent bag.

I made a little note here to talk to you about California black walnuts.

The standard throughout the United States to people who actually buy

black walnut kernels is what we call in the brokerage field Eastern

black walnuts. That means Kentucky and Tennessee. Those are Eastern

blacks, they are the blacks with the flavor, the blacks that stand up.

From my home state they have Missouri blacks, but the quality isn't

there. The flavor doesn't hold up. But you people down here grow the

finest blacks in the world. California, yes, California grows and shells

a lot of black walnuts, but they don't have a black walnut flavor. The

flavor is gone. Where it went, I don't know. But there isn't any black

walnut flavor in California blacks. [A different species, _Juglans

hindsi_--Ed.]

So some unscrupulous people buy California blacks and mix them with

Eastern black walnuts. Then they can't call them Eastern blacks. They

are just black walnut kernels. But black walnut kernels that are 100 per

cent Eastern black walnut kernels should be the standard of black

walnuts through the country.

Now, Tom has told you something about the process of shelling. I am just

going on to say that the average sheller gets about 10 to 11.7 pounds of

black walnut kernels to the hundred pounds. So you can realize there

again what a problem he has.

Well, the marketing of black walnuts is the selling of black walnuts in

the shell or shelled. We have very little demand in the Chicago markets

for in-the-shell black walnuts. I probably sell, oh, maybe 5,000 pounds

a year on South Water Market, and they go out to the various stores, and

they, in turn, sell them to the homes that like to crack black walnuts

instead of buying the kernels.

The American public buy with their eyes. Consequently, the packaging of

black walnut kernels or the packaging of any merchandise is very

important. I made a statement this morning that has always been

interesting to me. You know, Chicago is the biggest candy center in the

world, and we do a lot of experimenting with candy. Now, your industry

is tied very closely to candy, because a lot of the black walnuts,

hickory nuts, and the like, go into the making of candy. But to prove my

point, a number of times friends of mine who are interested in the sale

of merchandise have taken quality candy and packed it in a common box,

and they have taken an inferior quality of candy and packed it in a

fancy box and set it on the floor and put the same price on both

products. The American public, remember, buys with their eyes. So they

buy something that is well dressed and they buy that inferior product,

twice or three times as fast as they would that quality product in the

common box.

I am bringing this out to illustrate a point. _Well packaged

merchandise, sightly merchandise, always pays._ Quality to you people

who actually crack black walnuts in your homes is something that will

pay dividends. Separate your big kernels. Offer them to the public and

they will pay for them.

I was talking to Dr. Jones of Pennsylvania about the sale of black

walnut halves. He says that he gets a good many of them. Well, there

are throughout these United States of ours a good many very fancy

stores that will buy merchandise of this type. But the quantity that

anyone gets is very small, so the suggestion that I made to Dr. Jones is

that he take his quarters and mix them with his halves. That's not

cheating or anything like it. It is making a product that is superior.

And you know they say if a man makes a better mousetrap the world will

come to his door. And that is generally true. Sometimes it takes a long

time to bring it to the American public or to your buyers, to make them

realize that you have a superior product, but that's the thing that it

takes.

Now, there are a number of ways they sell blacks in this country. They

sell them in two-ounce cellophane bags, they sell them in six-ounce

cellophane, they sell them in eight-ounce cellophane, but the greater

quantity of the blacks are sold in bulk, as Tom told you, in 35- and

50-pound cases, and they go to the candy manufacturer, they go to the

ice cream manufacturer, and chiefly throughout the southern part of the

United States for ice cream, believe it or not. The Southern States buy

more black walnut ice cream than any other division of the United

States. In the Central West, too, black walnuts are quite popular for

use in ice cream.

Now, if there is anyone that has any questions, I'd like for you to ask

them, and I will try to answer them, I won't promise that I can, about

the marketing of black walnuts.

* * * * *

A Member: What's the retail sale on those cellophane bags?

Mr. McCauley: What would be the retail sale price?

A Member: Yes.

Mr. McCauley: Well, the cellophaning of walnuts is quite an expensive

proposition. We will say right now the kernels are worth 70 cents a

pound. The cellophaner has to add a dime a pound to that price, so he

figures his cost at 80 cents and the cost of cellophane, and he sells

that merchandise so that he makes a 15 per cent profit. Let me see if I

can tell you, a two-ounce bag--

Mr. Mullins: It sells for from 18 cents to 25 cents.

Mr. McCauley: Yes, 18 cents in the chain stores. An 8-ounce package at A

& P in Chicago will sell for 59 or 69 cents. I have forgotten now just

what it is. I can't keep these prices in my mind, although I will tell

you this now. If any of you ever come to Chicago, I have an experimental

plant in Chicago. If you could remember McCauley, it's "McCauley

Company," or "McCauley Machinery Company," and in that plant I also have

a new machine for bagging nuts, cellophane bagging. It makes the bag,

fills it and seals it in one operation, and we have operated that

machine at the rate of 100 bags per minute, 2-ounce or 6-ounce, it

doesn't make any difference. The only trouble is the people couldn't

handle the bags that fast, so we had to cut it down to 58 a minute. It's

quite an operation, and at this time it is an experimental operation.

But I would be more than pleased to have any of you drop in on me in

Chicago. If I am not there someone in my organization will be glad to

show you, if you tell them what you came for.

I have a "California" walnut, or Persian, as you call it. I was much

surprised to see all these samples of walnuts down here. I have a walnut

shelling plant in Chicago, I do at this time. Maybe when you get there

it will be a pecan shelling plant, or maybe it will be a _Macadamia_ nut

plant. How many of you people have ever heard of _Macadamia_ nuts?

(Several hands raised.) More than I thought for. Well, we are working on

a plant to shell _Macadamias_ now. Of course, that is a tropical nut,

grown chiefly in Hawaii and Australia. The Australian nut is not nearly

as good as the Hawaiian nut. But to those of you who are not familiar

with the nut, I have given it to any number of people and asked for

their reaction, and some said it tasted like a filbert, others said it

tasted like cocoanut, and the third one named was Brazil nut. So it's a

very pleasant nut to eat, but very, very expensive.

Dr. Moss: I live in Williamsburg in Whitley County not far from you, and

we have no market there for black walnuts at all and got quite a lot of

them there. I wonder if it would be practical to have a collection

center.

Mr. Mullins: It certainly would. In the southeastern part of Texas we

have one.

Dr. MacDaniels: A question, Mr. McCauley. You said that you are able to

recover about 11 per cent in the cracking plant on the average, I think

you said 10 to 11.7 for ordinary run quality. Now, if you had walnuts

that would run 25 to 28 per cent kernel, how much would your processing

plants recover out of that, I am just-wondering?

Mr. McCauley: Well, I would like to say two per cent less than the

hand-cracked weight. In other words, if you had a total, hand-cracking

total kernel content of 25 per cent, I would like to say 23, but I think

that is just a little bit strong. In Tom's early processing of black

walnut kernels at Renfro Valley his first average was 16 per cent on

wild nuts. I don't know where he got those nuts. They must have been

Thomas variety. But as he told me today, he is down to 10.7.

Mr. Mullins: Those nuts I talked about, Mac, that ran up that high

percentage were from over in Clark County around Winchester. And I have

quite a few of them that I pick-up that are even larger in size than

some of these Thomas nuts that are lying in here, out of that particular

locality. They are very big.

Mr. McCauley: You will find that that is true. Your percentage varies

over the country. I like to think that the wild seedling black walnut

has a possibility of about 18 pounds in a hundred. I may be wrong.

Dr. MacDaniels: Is that loss in the cracking procedure; I mean, that the

things don't crack out?

Mr. McCauley:. The loss is in the cracking, but on an 18 pounds

possibility we would probably get between 14 and 15 per cent with this

new method of cracking and processing.

Dr. MacDaniels: Now, if you had a nut that would run hand-cracked 24 per

cent, you lose 2 in your cracking procedure, and you recover 22. Would

you pay twice as much for nuts of that quality as you would for common

grade?

Mr. McCauley: Yes, I think that I would. If I had assurance that I was

going to get 22 per cent kernels I would be very pleased to pay double.

It would pay me, if I were shelling, to pay twice as much for that

variety for the simple reason that I only have one cost of picking. Now,

the average cost of picking black walnuts kernels is about 11-1/2 cents

a pound. At least, that's the best I have ever been able to do with

them. And if you sold me a walnut that would give me twice as many

kernels with one cracking and one picking, I'd make money and I could

pay you twice as much money for that nut.

Dr. MacDaniels: What volume would a cracker have to have to make it

interesting? What quantity would have to be produced and offered to a

cracker to make it interesting? That is, say I have 50 bushels of

Thomas. That isn't any good to you, because your cracking plant--

Mr. McCauley: Why wouldn't it? If I had 50 bushels, that is 2500 pounds,

right? All right, Tom could run his plant for two hours and a half, we

will say, on 2500 pounds, and in that two hours and a half he would be

getting as much kernels as he would otherwise in five hours. That's good

business.

Mr. Chase: I'd just like to comment on that 18 per cent kernel you

mentioned as the average you'd like to think of. Mr. Zarger has run a

study on the sample trees in the Tennessee Valley to measure the kernel

content in some 130 trees for about seven years running, and it pans out

to about 18 per cent. I thought you'd just like to know.

Mr. McCauley: I didn't want to make a definite statement and then have

somebody throw something back in my face. That's why I said I'd like to

think.

Mr. Fisher: Since this question has come up and a cracker is here, and

that is the question, whether the commercial cracker would be willing to

pay a premium price for premium nuts, I wonder if Tom will answer the

question, would he pay twice as much?

Mr. Mullins: Certainly.

Mr. Chase: Mr. Acker is another sheller who operates in Morristown,

Tennessee, and Broadway, Virginia, who just dropped in on us. I'd like

to ask him that same question.

Mr. Acker: What is the question again?

Mr. Chase: Would a considerable quantity of walnuts such as Thomas be

worth more to you?

Mr. Acker: We'd be inclined to buy them according to the value we get

out of them.

Dr. MacDaniels: What would you do, run sort of a pilot test on them?

Mr. Acker: If I can buy something for a dollar and make money on it, I

am willing to try.

Mr. Chase: I made a little unscheduled talk last night in which I said

from my information from shellers in Nashville, particularly, that they

at this time would not be able to pay any premium price for higher

quality nuts simply because they do not have time to examine each

bushel, each hundred pounds that comes in and see whether they would pay

a special price for better walnuts. Is that the general situation?

Mr. McCauley: Yes, I think generally that is. They take everything at

the price of seedling variety. However, you gentlemen who are growing

cultivated nuts shouldn't be too disturbed, because of the fact that

there is going to be a time in the not-too-distant future where you can

dispose of those nuts according to the kernel content within the nut.

President Davidson: I think that's the answer. Eventually it will come.

Mr. McCauley: It's good business. Stop and consider. We go right back to

that point where we are going to get twice the amount of merchandise out

of a hull which must be broken, which must be picked, which must be

cleaned, which is one operation. In a two and a half hour period, which

is what it would take, we will say, to run 2500 pounds, you would get

the net content on a Thomas variety that you would ordinarily receive in

five hours of actual operation. You are saving two and a half hours

labor, you are saving two and a half hours machine time, and you are

getting just twice as much.

Mr. McDaniel: You'd have twice as many girls on the sorting belt,

wouldn't you, to examine that volume?