1947 CROP

Pounds of Chestnuts from Original Trees at Eastern Shore Nurseries, Inc.

No. 1, 78; No. 2, 58; No. 3, 51¼; No. 4, 7½; No. 5, 49; No. 6, 31; No. 7, 34; No. 8, 31½; No. 9, 63; No. 10, 40½ No. 11, 61½; No. 12, 64½; No. 13, 56; No. 14, 47½; No. 15, 74; No. 16, 60; No. 18, 106; No. 19, 25½—Total, 938¾ pounds.

Young Orchard: 225½ pounds.

Discussion after E. Sam Hemming's paper

Corsan: "Do you recommend the use of lime?"

Hemming: "We do not use lime. We use Vigoro at the rate of 1 to 1½ lbs. to inch of diameter per tree."

Corsan: "Why do you use Vigoro?"

Hemming: "No particular reason, just that it is available."

Member: "What time of year do you fertilize your trees?"

Hemming: "We fertilize during the winter—usually during December."

Crane: "Last year we used a method of storing Chinese chestnuts which proved very satisfactory. Two thousand pounds of nuts were stored last year. Fall planting is good where one can use it but in a lot of areas it can not be used because of rats robbing the plantings. We have to store the nuts. The procedure we follow is to harvest every other day. Nuts are placed in tin cans with friction top lids. The lids should have one to three holes of 1/16" diameter in them to provide air. Cans are placed in storage at a temperature of 32 to 40 degrees F."

Stoke: "I keep chestnuts in the cellar in a can with an open top in what we call limestone sand. Keep wonderfully well. Chestnuts must have air."

Gravatt: "Down south we have a lot of trouble with decay. We take nuts right from the bur and put them in the soil. They give much better germination."

Crane: "The Chinese harvest their chestnuts just as soon as the bur cracks. They do not wait for the nuts to drop from the trees but harvest the nuts from the trees and store in covered pottery jars. They plant in the fall of the year. They do not hold nuts for any length of time."

Corsan: "How about charcoal?"

G. Smith: "Charcoal is good to store nuts in. They are shipped from China that way."

Smith: "Would chestnuts stand carbon bisulphide for getting the weevil out, or is the hot water treatment better?"

Crane: "Carbon bisulphide treatment is dangerous, it will kill weevils but it will also kill the nuts so they will not germinate. Unless precautions are used it may cause an explosion and fire. Methyl bromide treatment is better."

Stoke: "The hot water treatment is the best. It consists of immersing the nuts in water at 120 degrees F. for forty minutes."

Hemming: "I have raised about 100,000 seedlings and have never seen blight on any of my seedlings."

Dr. Smith: "A tree needs usually to be as big as the small end of a baseball bat before the bark opens enough to let in the blight spores."

Stoke: "Blight begins where there is rough bark which provides lodgment for the spores. Rough bark and moisture result in blight, hence the disease usually starts near the ground."

Crane: "The blight problem in the growing of chestnuts has often been stressed. I think you will have more loss from sunscald and root rot than you will from blight. Blight is a minor trouble with us. The Chinese chestnut naturally grows with a low head. It is a mistake to cut off the low branches on the trees until they attain some size, they can then be cut off."

Stoke: "Regarding the protection of nut trees against winter sun scald, I find that if you take ordinary aluminum paint and paint the south and southwest side of nut trees it will last for two years."

Dr. Smith: "Chestnut trees have blighted for me where the water table was too high and trees of same origin or better drained ground nearby did not blight. Blight is often a sign that the tree wants something it lacks—much like disease in humans."

Results of a Chinese Chestnut Rootstock Experiment

J. W. McKAY[4]

Introduction

The propagation of chestnut species by budding or grafting has been performed by different workers with varying degrees of success. Many have found that grafted trees could be produced and grown successfully but that graft union troubles developed in a certain percentage of the trees either soon after grafting or a few years later. The variety "Carr" is known to graft with difficulty in certain localities and to give a high percentage of poor unions both at the time of grafting and after a few years of growth. The question of relationship of scion and stock has been considered by many workers to have an important bearing on the success of grafting operations but no critical work has been done to determine this point. Some investigators hold that scions of one species may be grafted upon stock of another species without harmful effects. The results of the budding experiment with Chinese chestnut reported in this paper are the first of a series of tests designed to contribute needed information about stock-scion relationship in chestnuts.