LETTER FROM G. H. CORSAN, TORONTO, CANADA
My place of 15½ acres just west of Toronto, is in a small valley containing sandy, gravelly and clay soils, while the creek bottom land is rich black humus. My efforts are purely experimental and the losses do not worry me as I simply wish to know what will succeed in this district. Peaches and grapes grow on my place.
Last winter I bought twelve Paragon chestnut trees from Colonel Sober. All twelve are alive and looking well and this fourth day of November are just turning color and dropping their leaves. You will probably remember that of the three samples that Colonel Sober displayed at the convention last year I took the walking stick. I had to go to Columbia and other South Carolina points for three weeks afterwards, so that it was well into January before I finally got the "walking stick" planted. Well, it is also alive and has that well-known Paragon form, five fan-shaped shoots above the graft.
I planted seeds from all over the world, in rows, and of ten bushels of black walnuts only five nuts sprouted. On the other hand, every pecan came up. Hickories and English cob nuts behaved a little better than the black walnuts. I slip a little collar of tar paper over each little tree to protect it against field mice, rabbits and ground hogs. Red squirrels trouble me the least of all the pests as I cannot keep them out of my double section wire rat trap, and the pet stock men give my boys 30 cents apiece for them.
I also bought a dozen Pomeroy walnuts last winter for experiment. They are all alive but the extraordinary late and early frosts were hard on them and nipped them down three inches from the top where they again sprouted out. This occurred to all but one tree which positively refused to take any notice of either the late or the early frost. I consider this one tree worth many times the money I paid for the dozen.
My experiments are only two years old but I will mention that my English filberts or Kentish cob nuts are doing well, also my Battle Creek persimmon seedlings that I planted in an exposed position two years ago.
Seeds from those Battle Creek persimmon trees can be procured from Dr. J. H. Kellogg by writing him. They are the two most northern persimmon trees which I have discovered so far. The fruit is good to the taste and the trees have lived through terribly cold winters. I mention this as many of you are fruit growers also and want to get persimmon stock in order to graft the Japanese persimmon on. The female tree every second year is loaded to the point of breakage and should do well for stock.
Speaking about procuring seeds from dealers, I can get here and there for one cent as much as I have to pay the dealer a dollar for. For instance, while passing through Phoebus, Va., I asked a lady what she wanted for Juglans sieboldiana and she said 5 cents a quart or 35 cents a peck. She only got 16 bushels from a 20 year-old tree! They were bigger and better specimens than I got from Japan at about five nuts for one dollar, postage extra.
Then I wrote to a gentleman who had a small tree of Juglans cordiformis in Ontario and he said that he only had a bushel which he was expressing to me and to send him a dollar! Think, and the Japs sent me three nuts for one dollar!! A lady at Niagara Falls, Ontario, told me that she had a little tree of J. sieboldiana so I asked her the price and she sent me half a bushel and said to pay the express charges which were a quarter!
And it is the same way with these forest seed merchants, they send me for dollars the seeds of pinus edulis and pinus Koriensis that it would take a powerful microscope to discern, and I afterwards bought of a fruit merchant in Milwaukee a big glassful for a nickel!
Roadside planting is a failure, for, besides rodents little and big, there are all kinds of animals from sheep to horses to destroy them, so that I have to plant all my trees at least four feet within my fence line.
Juglans Mandshurica seed I find impossible to procure so far. There are two magnificent trees in Toronto planted by an old man who is dead now. These trees show no sign of ever having been winter killed and are 13 and 19 feet high but have not fruited yet. The leaves are very long and the trees resemble the stag horn sumach, except that they are distinctly Juglans in appearance; but the growth of the year's shoots is thick and long like a coppice growth.