and a sheaf of wheat. I would make the symbolization double by adding to
it some kind of a nut tree in fruit. I have long had a vision of waving,
sturdy, fruitful trees yielding nuts and other valuable fruit, and
standing on our hilly and rocky land where now the gully and other signs
of poverty, destruction and desolation gape at us. This vision of the
fruitful tree also extends to the arid lands, there also vastly
increasing our productive areas. Beyond a doubt the tree is the greatest
engine of production nature has given us, and in its ability to yield
harvests without soil injury on rough, rocky, and steep lands, and on
arid lands, carries the possibility of the approximate doubling of the
area of first-class cropping land in the United States, also probably in
many other countries.
Twenty-one years ago this spring I began in a small way to bring into
reality this vision of the tree-covered fruitful hills, although my
interest in the matter goes back at least four years further to the time
when I filled my pockets with the large grafted European chestnuts grown
along his lanes by the late Edwin Satterthwaite, of Jenkintown, Pa.
My first essay at nut tree cropping was short but not sweet. I planted
an acre and a half of Persian walnuts, seedlings being the only things
then to be found. There being no one within my reach to guide me much,
if any, I bought such seedlings as were to be had from a New Jersey
nurseryman. I mulched them, and saw them each year grow less and less
until the third season they disappeared. I have, however, some survival
from this attempt in the form of black walnuts, which I had the
foresight to plant as nuts immediately beside the Persian walnuts when
they were planted as trees. Some of these walnuts are now quite sturdy
young trees ready to be top-worked to some good strain.
My second attempt was the Paragon chestnut. In 1897 I started in on a
100-acre tract on the Blue Ridge Mountains, near Bluemont, Va., much of
it too rocky for any cultivated crop, but admirably fitted to native
chestnuts, and covered with a perfect stand. I had a good many acres
well established, when, in 1908, the chestnut blight convinced me that
further extension was perilous. My orchard has since been given over to
the Department of Agriculture as the scene of their experiments in
fighting the chestnut blight, but they have given it up, withdrawn their
efforts, and half the orchard is now cut down and planted to Winesap and
Grimes Golden Apples, which ten year's experience has shown me can be
grown on such land without cultivation if mulched with the weeds and
bushes that grow around them, and given some commercial fertilizer. I
have a number of such young trees planted in 1907 in land of this
character that are now full of fine quality fruit.
My third nut-growing attempt was with more select strains of seedling
English walnuts than the miserable chancelings with which I began. One
tree from the magnificent specimens at 3115 O street, N. W., Washington,
D. C., and several from Pomeroy, promptly perished, apparently from
winter-killing, and my nut hopes were at a very low ebb when the
Northern Nut Growers' Association came upon my intellectual horizon.
From it I have learned how to graft the walnut, the pecan and other
hickories, and I have again started in on the English walnut, using the
Mayette, Franquette, and several of the eastern seedlings. After the
usual disastrous failures at top-working, I was this June in such a
large condition of hope that I was in serious need of being hooped to
keep myself down to normal size. Such artificial aids to the maintenance
of normal size are, however, no longer necessary after this summer's
experiences, during which the bud-worm has cut the ends of my Persian
walnut shoots and the blight apparently has withered up my young grafts
so that an 18 inch shoot of July 1st is now 17 inches black and 1 inch
brownish green, and in other cases entirely dead. Alas what a slaughter!
This apparently puts my Persian walnut hopes into a state of neutrality.
I hope it is benevolent neutrality. So far as actual expecting is
concerned, however, I am not doing any just now. I wait.
The grafted black walnuts, however, have met with none of these
accidents, and these are a substantial and solid hope, as is the pecan,
which is behaving handsomely on its own roots and also on the hickory
roots.
_Tree Crops Insurance._
As my experience with nut trees well shows, there is little doubt that
we are now in a period of great activity of plant enemies. They are
indeed a by-product of the splendid work now being done in bringing to
us the crop plants of all parts of the world. Along with the Chinese and
Japanese products which have already been so valuable and promise us so
much more for American horticulture, we have received the San Jose
scale, the chestnut blight, and probably others will follow. For the
next twenty-five or fifty years while the nut industries are in what may
be properly considered the experimental stage, I wish to urge the great
necessity of some kind of crop insurance for the man who plants out any
kind of nut tree. Say what you please, the nuts are not as well known
and as reliable as the other fruits, such as the apple, and even apples
are uncertain enough.
_Crop Insurance Through Two-Story Farming._
By the term "crop insurance" I mean having something else on the same
land that will make a profit year after year, whether the tree pays or
not. If this is not feasible, there should be something else which can
be quickly converted into a crop if the main hope suddenly disappears.
For the man who is growing nuts on level, arable land, I believe I
cannot emphasize too strongly the pastured pig. Pigs below trees (and
nuts maybe above). This is merely the two-story farming that Europe was
practising when Columbus was a boy. Upon all good nut growers I urge the
pig for the first story. This unromantic but very practical aid to
income for the nut-grower has had the great honor to be accepted by a
president of the Northern Nut Growers' Association, Mr. Littlepage, and
by a president of the National Nut Growers' Association, Colonel Van
Duzee. Colonel Van Duzee, from the financial standpoint, really does not
have to have his pecan trees either to live or bear. He is making money
out of the oats, cowpeas, crimson clover, vetch, soy beans, velvet
beans, and other forage crops which he is growing between the pecan
trees, and which the pigs are harvesting for him and converting into
salable products. Of course this makes the pecan trees grow like weeds,
but I am now talking about the crop insurance aspect of it. This crop
insurance aspect of Colonel Van Duzee's last planting cannot be too
strongly emphasized. He has planted the trees 100 feet apart,
practically four and one-quarter trees to the acre, and has then
proceeded to the hog farming business as though the trees were not
there. This may sound somewhat fantastic to the man of the North.
Perhaps it sounds well-nigh criminal to the man who is trying to sell
pecan tree land to schoolmarms, talking fifty pecan trees to the acre.
When a tree has the habit of spreading two or three or four feet per
year when well fed, and keeping it up an indefinite time, the question
of ultimate size is one to be reckoned with. That the pecan tree can
attain great size in the North, as well as in the South, is attested by
the record of a tree in northern Maryland on Spesutia Island, near the
head of Chesapeake Bay. The tree is described by one of our members, Mr.
Wilmer P. Hoopes, as being eighty-four years old, hale and hearty.
"This tree is 106 feet tall, with a spread of 110 feet, has two limbs,
respectively 57 and 60 feet long and is 13 feet in circumference, 3 feet
above ground, and is an annual bearer of thin shell, nuts that, though
rather small now, are mighty good to eat."
If nut trees are going to grow into that size, we must plant very wide
or make up our minds to a very heroic and very difficult act, one which
many men in the South should do this minute, namely, cut down half or
three-quarters of the nut trees on a given acre.
I wish to emphasize the health aspect from the standpoint of the tree of
this very wide planting. It is generally recognized by horticultural
authority that trees develop sickness and disease when crowded in large
numbers. The pecan trees 100 feet apart may perhaps escape this danger
and have the sun on all parts of their leaf surface, a fact, by the way,
which is necessary to crop production on this and other nut trees.
This wide planting is practically the method followed in most of the
important French Persian walnut districts. With very few exceptions
their trees are isolated, a man having two or twenty, or thirty,
scattered about his farm, usually in the midst of his fields where they
can develop to perfection, take the tillage of the crops, and bring in
some extra money, which one of the owners very significantly told me is
"income without effort." This income without effort aspect of the matter
takes the form of a man having to pay as much rent for a good walnut
tree in the department of Dordogne, as he does for an acre of good wheat
land alongside.
_Rough Land Tree Crops Insurance._
What kind of tree crops insurance might I have had for my chestnuts
grafted nineteen years ago? Had I known then as much as I now know about
nut trees, excepting the chestnut blight, I should have planted that
place thickly with black walnut nuts and northern pecan nuts, unless the
squirrels were too quick for me, in which case I should have used little
seedlings. These I would have kept in a submerged but hopeful condition
by occasionally cutting them down. This would keep them from crowding
the chestnut trees, but would by no means have kept me out of a stand of
vigorous pecans and black walnuts ready to graft at very short notice.
When the blight blew its signal of national alarm in 1908, I could have
gone to grafting those trees and they would by this time probably have
been in bearing and ready to replace the chestnuts which are now dying
with the blight.
If any one wishes to contradict my statement about these trees living
with such treatment, I will admit that I am not speaking from experience
with regard to the pecan, but I believe the experience of others
admirably verifies the statement I have made. I am, however, speaking
literally from my own experience when I refer to the black walnut. For
ten summers past I have in July and August scythed off a certain tract
of stump land planted to apples. Each year black walnuts and butter nuts
have been cut, and now at the end of that time the stubs are still
annually throwing up vigorous shoots 2-1/2 to 4 feet in length, and if
they are allowed to escape for a season, they dart past a man's head so
fast he wonders what has happened.
While I hope to experiment for forty more years on my mountain side in
the attempt to cover it with waving fruitful trees that are so immune to
pests as not to need spraying, I shall never again be caught with only
one possibility upon a given piece of land. If I should top-work my
native hickories to shagbark, which I know involves considerable waiting
and considerable uncertainty, I can, with very little expense, put upon
the same ground a full stand of grafted black walnuts and a full stand
of budded pecans, or if I do not care to go to that much trouble, I can
graft my hickories and plant my native black walnuts and merely keep
them there in submerged condition as reserve trees ready to be grafted
at any time. For a pecan orchard I can do exactly the same thing, using
black walnuts as fillers, possible successors, or as ungrafted reserves.
For the Persian walnut, the black walnut can again come in as a filler
or as a reserve, and for grafted blacks of any variety, other blacks can
be kept waiting for the arrival of possible better varieties which could
easily become the head of the corner.
My experience with transplanting seedling pecans shows that they, too,
can, without serious difficulty, be planted out in such rough land and
kept waiting there for years until the day of possible utilization.
Lastly, I wish to emphasize one more possible crop insurance tree for
the man who is planting nuts on land difficult of cultivation, or
entirely untillable, and that is the persimmon. I have paid my respects
above to the tilled crops and the pastured pig for the arable land, and
for the unarable land I would still emphasize the pig and give him other
sources of food to supplement pasture. Among these possible foods is the
persimmon which as yet has been little appreciated in an extensive way,
although hundreds of thousands of men know it is highly prized forage
and of considerable fattening value. It has a crop insurance virtue,
however, other than its acceptability as pig feed. That is the hardiness
of the tree and the ease of establishing it. In my pasture lot the
Angora goat, even when pushed with hunger, has not touched persimmon
wood or leaves. The same is practically true of the black walnut and of
the butternut. This fact is one of great importance, because it means
that we can keep rough land in pastures, even goat pasture, during the
period when we are planting out tall-headed nut trees of almost any
variety, and at the same time have a perfect stand of two kinds of crop
insurance trees coming along, namely, walnuts and persimmons.
In this connection it is desirable to point out the relation of this
recommendation to the actual practice in nut growing regions of Europe.
They do not plant a little two or three foot tree. They plant an eight
or nine-foot tree often so slight it can not hold itself up, and is kept
in place by one or two stiff poles. This tall-headed fellow stands out
in the middle of the wheat field, the vineyard, the hay field, the goat
pasture, the cow pasture, with its head entirely out of reach of the
pasturing animal, its trunk protected by one or two stout sticks, and in
due time it takes hold. With the trees properly developed in the
nursery, I know of no reason why the same practice cannot prevail here,
and I have at least one Busseron pecan tree that has gone safely through
the first summer of it.
The practice of one pecan grower in Texas, reported in the Nut Journal,
is suggestive of a crop insurance practice capable of wide use in the
North, namely, planting of filler trees of quick-yielding varieties.
There is no reason why the northern nut trees might not be planted 40,
60, or 80 feet apart in peach or even apple orchards, as did the Texas
man with his nut trees 72 feet apart, occupying every fourth place in an
18-foot spaced fig orchard. I would call attention of Northerners,
however, to the desirability of the mulberry, the most rapid growing and
cheapest of all our fruit trees, doing well in Carolina at a space of 30
feet, which would enable the Northerner, by a little variation of the
interval between his mulberry trees, to plant nut trees anywhere from 60
to 100 feet apart.
_Sod Mulch Nut Orchards._
I know that any suggestions of the production of trees without plowing
is unorthodox, and therefore not likely to be heard straight, and
particularly perilous in the presence of professional horticulturists in
state or national employ. To such I wish to call attention to the fact
that I have emphasized in this matter, first, the tillage methods, and
that I am making no knock against cultivation. We all know that it works
under some conditions, and we all also know that there are some
conditions in which it will not work. If I lived on level, sandy loam,
I'd be a furious tiller of tree crops fifteen times a year. But I was
born upon a rocky hill, and now I live upon another that is higher and
rockier, and I don't believe in tilling it fifteen times a year. Must I
abandon it, or adopt uses to its conditions? Out of these conditions
mulch orcharding has come. Despite the orthodox, I know that the growing
of some kinds of fruit trees without cultivation has passed the
experimental stage. At this moment millions of barrels of apples are
approaching perfection in orchards in Virginia and other eastern states
that have not been plowed for more than one, and sometimes for more than
five seasons. The application of this method to nut trees is still in
the embryonic stage, with theoretic factors favoring it.
I do not know how far the mulch-fertilizer method can go, but I am sure
it may go much farther than most professional horticulturists will
admit. I find that the pecan tree starts off nicely under the mulch
fertilizer conditions of the apple. The walnut tree has certainly done
it for ages with less aid, and I believe it is up to us to find methods
of handling land and trees and moisture which will enable us to avoid
the danger, costs, and difficulties of plowing rough land and still get
good trees. For example, the absence of cultivation does not necessarily
imply the absence of fertilizer. The way a few black walnut trees in my
apple orchard have snapped their buds and grown in response to the
nitrate of soda that has been put upon the apple trees beside has been
little short of astounding. The way a poor little starveling persimmon
wakes up when the same treatment comes along, is equally interesting. I
cannot speak definitely yet about the influence of fertilizer on the
Persian walnut or the pecan.
In connection with the fertilization matter, it is well known that a
crop of clover or other legumes is very important as a part of the
rotation of crops in plow agriculture. Similarly I expect great value
can be obtained in our pastured and fertilized nut orchards if we so
treat the soil with lime, phosphorous, and whatever else is needed, to
give a good mat of white clover and other legumes which are undoubtedly
a good nitrogen supply for trees whose roots interlace with theirs.
Similarly I see great possibilities in the interplanting of some
leguminous crop tree such as the honey locust or the Kentucky coffee
bean in our nut orchards. It is true neither of these trees has yet been
selected and developed to the crop point, but they are much more
promising than Sargent says the wild Persian walnut was at its
beginning. It is an established fact that a non-leguminous plant can
take nourishment from the nitrate-bearing nodules on the roots of
adjacent living legumes, to say nothing of its well-known ability to
feed upon the nitrate collections of legumes that have lived in past
seasons within reach of its roots. Thus the interplanting of a legume
and a nut tree seems to promise a continuous supply of the all-important
nitrates for the nut tree.
_The Question of Moisture._
It is not necessarily true that a tree gets a low percentage of the
local rainfall because it is not plowed. The last palliation, or is it
provocation, that I would throw into the camp of the orthodox and the
worshippers of the plow, is the water-pocket, or small field reservoir,
draining a few square rods and holding hard by the roots of a tree a few
gallons or a few barrels of water which would otherwise run away. I
showed this association a number of photographs of these water-pockets
last year. Their most extensive American user, Dr. Mayer, considers them
successful from the tree's standpoint and profitable from the economic
standpoint. Since the great virtue of cultivation is the conservation of
moisture, I will submit that this device, worked out and used for three
centuries by the olive growers of Tunis, for twenty years by Dr. Mayer,
of Pennsylvania, and about the same length of time by Colonel Freeman
Thorpe, Minnesota, can from the point of theory and perhaps also from
the point of practice, equal tillage on some soils, and with less labor
and much greater economy in farm management, for the making of water
pots is a job for odd times, the bane of agriculture, and tillage all
comes in a pile--another bane of agriculture.
Upon the whole, I think my 21 years of nut loving have run me directly
and indirectly into ten thousand hard earned, and as yet, partly not
earned dollars. Rather a deep sting for a pedagogue. When the last of my
grafted chestnut trees come down next year, I will have little to show
for that ten thousand, but an experimental nursery and some experimental
trees scattered about the hillside. But the experiments are still
interesting. I still have hope, and I still love trees. I am still
ahead.
* * * * *
THE PRESIDENT: I believe every other man here today has defended his
thesis. I will not claim any exemption.
DR. STABLER: The President has mentioned the combination of apple and
walnut trees. I would like to ask him if he has seen any deleterious
effects upon the apple from the proximity of walnut roots. Now, some of
my friends in Montgomery county have the idea that an apple tree will
not live within fifty feet of a walnut tree. I have, myself, seen a
number of apple trees die, apparently because they were neighbors of
walnut trees. I wasn't sure that that was the cause of death, but they
died, and walnut trees situated in an apple orchard will have a ring of
dead apple trees around them. Now that is one case that I know of where
the walnut tree acts injuriously upon the vegetation to which it is
neighbor. All of the farm crops, wheat, corn, grass, and oats, and rye,
etc., seem to thrive just as well under the limbs of a black walnut as
they do away from it. In fact, frequently you see the grass greener and
more luxuriant right up to the trunk of the tree than anywhere else, but
it doesn't seem to be true of the apple. Now, I would like to hear from
the President.
THE PRESIDENT: I simply made that as a suggestion and referred to this
instance as an illustration of the effect of fertilization on the
walnut.
DR. AUGUSTUS STABLER: Well, how are those apple trees doing?
THE PRESIDENT: I had enough trouble without looking for more by mixing
walnut and apple trees. The walnut trees are small, merely the growth
from stubs repeatedly cut.
The next on our program is a paper by Mr. McMurran, of the Department of
Agriculture, upon the question of diseases of the English walnut. Mr.
McMurran.
MR. S. M. MCMURRAN: I am sorry that in this, my first appearance before
this Association I haven't a more optimistic and encouraging subject to
talk on than diseases. You men and women who are burdened with
establishing this industry have enough on you without contending with
diseases, and it was not my intention to talk upon diseases at this
meeting, but Mr. Littlepage, Mr. C. A. Reed, and Mr. Jones, and several
others, have been urging the matter strongly, which explains my
appearance at this time.
Walnut blight is a very common and serious disease on the Pacific Coast.
It may be a native disease, though it has never been reported on native
black walnuts, and it has proved a very serious menace to the seedling
English walnut groves on the Pacific Coast.
This little piece of work I want to tell you about tonight was done
through the co-operation of Mr. Jones and Mr. Rush, at Lancaster, Pa.,
and has just been completed within the last few days. I made a trip
through New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, about the first of
August, and found a number of nuts that had all the appearance of being
infected with the walnut blight germ. They had the same appearance as
those nuts that you saw this afternoon in Georgetown. I brought them
back here and made cultures from them in the laboratory, and after that
the problem was absurdly easy. The germ was obtained without difficulty,
I obtained a pure culture, and then I went up to Mr. Rush's place, at
Lancaster, and made a number of inoculations, of which these few I have
here are typical. This nut that you see here was inoculated from a pure
culture along with a number of others, and the condition is as you see
it, after about a month. Inoculations were also made into twigs, and I
will pass these around for your examination.
The one marked, inoculated, has a little canker on it, and on the other
you will have difficulty in finding the needle punctures, but you will
see them if you look closely.