In the first few years that this plantation that we are speaking of in Jackson County produced, not many people paid much attention to it or attached much significance to it. The man who had charge of it gave the nuts away for experimental purposes or for any reason that anybody happened to ask for them, and shipped a lot of them free. But along in the early 1940's he began to find out what he had, and he started selling seed and made a pretty good thing out of it.
Last year was the first year that we had gotten seed from that plantation. We got 75 pounds of good nuts taken in the fall of 1947.
We have another orchard, another plantation that led us to become interested, I guess, in producing blight-resistant chestnut as a game food and along forestry lines, and that is the orchard that we have on nursery property. It was one of the early ones, and I expect one of the earliest in the state, but it was planted along back in 1936, fifty-one trees.
When we started in this we didn't know anything about it at all, so we have built up our small knowledge in the last few years. But it didn't take us long to realize that our orchard on our nursery property was of badly crossed material, and it had some very undesirable trees. If we succeeded in doing anything with them as a game food we would have to eliminate, and only last year did we get around to the place where we could secure authority to eliminate the undesirable species. We have about half of the stand left now, but we are pretty sure that the trees that we do have are of good strain.
It might be interesting for you to note—maybe some of you can top it—we were interested when this orchard was planted, in what would happen if the trees were planted and allowed to grow as a forest stand. So they were planted in six-by-six spacing. Of course, we got a lot of self-pruning and a lot of competition, as we would in forests by the trees growing up and competing with each other and reaching for height and light. Some of them died and some were so badly suppressed that they failed to make any growth at all. But there is one tree that we still have in that orchard that we are proud of, not from the standpoint of nut production, nor does it produce a very good nut as far as the human taste is concerned. But it has made a single stick that far surpasses any other tree we have in the orchard. It looks like a forest tree. In 1945—it might be hard for you to believe—it grew nine feet. That isn't an exaggeration. It was measured. We thought that was a lot better than fair growth. Of course, it hasn't made any growth like that since, and I don't think it ever did before, but it just had the push to go and went nine feet in one growing season.
Leaving that orchard for a few minutes, there were 38 plantings of from 10 to 50 trees each made by the Soil Conservation Service and the Division of Forest Pathology of the Bureau of Plant Industry in the spring of 1939. These were examined by Dr. Diller of that Bureau in the spring of 1940 and in 1947. He has told us that he graded those plantings as he found them, 10 being good, and he said the next 15 were only fair and he put 13 down as total failures.
Of those 13 that failed—from the forestry standpoint now, remember—he said that 7 of the failures were due to poor site selection, three were suppressed by surrounding hardwoods and other competing growth, and three had been destroyed by cattle.
[Footnote 1: Meaning, two years old, not transplanted in the nursery.—Ed.]
+A Commercial Chestnut Nurseryman+
I don't know whether any of you know of—I expect you do—the Gold Chestnut Nursery in West Virginia near Cowen, and it is owned and operated by Mr. Arthur A. Gold. He has been interested in blight-resistant chestnuts from a commercial standpoint, selling from his nursery for a good many years. He has worked with us some in the Conservation Commission and has given us the benefit of his experience. And if any of you have the opportunity I think you would be interested in seeing Mr. Gold's nursery. He was an old-time nurseryman that handled most of the conifers found in a commercial nursery, but in the last few years he has gone into chestnut production almost entirely, and if you have an opportunity, I am sure Mr. Gold would welcome you to his nursery in Webster County.