The Game Division of the Conservation Commission of West Virginia established three or four small plantings on the state forests in 1938 and 1939, but they had low survival. Dr. Diller in going around with some of us and checking on those has found that we were back there where all of us were trying to find something and trying to learn something and that we made many mistakes and that we picked poor stock, for one thing, and poor sites for another thing, but the great disadvantage and the biggest limiting factor was our poor selection of sites there in the beginning.
In handling chestnuts that you people handle maybe in small or large quantities where all of your time can be devoted to that particular thing, you probably have a lot of things that you do that we don't have time to do because at the nursery in West Virginia we are interested primarily in producing conifers and other forest trees for the reforestation of abandoned land. So in handling this Chinese chestnut as a game food we are working on a sideline. We have to pick it up as fast as we can do the job and do as much as we can and learn about as much as we can. And, of course, we learn slower than people who have the time to spend and perhaps the money to spend at it. But we are limited in those two respects.
But seed collections are made, and we find it necessary in collecting from two of the orchards that we are now using for seed to collect twice a day in the season that the nuts are ripening, because both of those orchards which we prize are close to forest lands and squirrel country, and they really give us a race for it. The fact of the matter is the orchard at the nursery has attracted the squirrels on that particular side of the mountain. I have hunted on opening day and killed my limit of squirrels without going outside of the residence and been back at work time at eight o'clock. It really attracts them on that side of the hill. We are going to compete with the squirrels, but as you will see, we have just about given up that orchard as a seed source.
We find it necessary to treat the seed, of course, before we plant it. Many of you people, of course, go into the spraying end of it before the nut ever develops. We haven't the time or the money right now to go into it that way, so we try to take care of the nut after we collect it and bring it in.
I expect it is not necessary for me to go into any of the details on any of the methods that may be used to get rid of the weevil, because you are all familiar with that. Maybe it suffices to say that we at the nursery now are using the hot water treatment. The little weevil is found in there and not always apparent. In fact, most of the time it isn't apparent that the nut is infested, but they are, and if we take measures to kill the weevil we haven't any germination of the weevil. We used gas once, but we are limited in that at present. It is a lot more expensive.
We have, in the first few years that we tried to produce chestnuts at the nursery, stratified them. We got along pretty well with that in damp sand, we got along fairly well in sawdust, and we got along especially well with damp sphagnum moss. But in the end we determined that we are getting better results if we plant the nuts as they are collected. In other words, the seed was taken from the orchard, treated to kill the weevil and put in the ground in the fall.
Now, you can't get away with that everywhere. Our orchard is far enough away from the nursery that we don't have any rodent damage. We have had some trouble from skunks, and they finally find out that the nuts are in there in a row where we have planted them, and they go right down and get them. But we have no trouble from mice or rats. We are far away from woodland and buildings.
We find that some people have trouble with wind or water erosion. We don't have that. So we can get by and do a better job and produce better trees by sowing nuts in the fall, and we sow them in the fall, just as if we were sowing black walnuts for production and distribution over the state.
By the next fall when we are ready to distribute those seedlings as 1-0 stock we find that we have produced seedlings of about 14 inches in height as 1-0 stock. From what I have seen that isn't a bad size to produce as 1-0 stock, though it is better in some places. We find, too, in the spring before germination, that in our particular section of the state along the Ohio River valley we sometimes get a dry spring and find it necessary to irrigate that land where we planted the chestnuts, just as the seed beds where we planted pine, in order to keep the ground moist and keep it in a condition where seeds will germinate freely.
We weed our chestnuts just as we do every row planted in the nursery, cultivate with the tractor about three times in a season, which is all the time we have to give to it, and hand weed it once. Perhaps it ought to have a little more than that. Some seasons I am sure it should, but that's about the time we are allowed or the time that we can allot to that.