I hope, Mr. Davidson, you will check me here on this time. I don't want to get too far out and upset the schedule.
President Davidson: All right, if necessary.
Mr. Quick: In distributing, the seedlings or blight-resistant chestnut seed in West Virginia we began back in 1943 putting them out in quantity. We had to limit them, the only thing in the nursery we had to limit the amount as to seed. That was because everybody in the state became very much interested, and the Conservation Commission makes those available to any land owner in the state free of charge if he will plant them as a game food but not under other circumstances. He can't use them for ornamentals, and he can't use them for shade purposes in his yard. But he can receive a limited number if he is willing to use them for game. So in scattering them over the state, so many people wanted so many of them that if we didn't watch we'd have all of our chestnuts planted in three or four, or half a dozen spots in the state, and we are interested in learning as much as we can by having them put out at different elevations, different sites and under different conditions, so we had to limit it to ten to an individual in 1943. We have gradually upped that as our production has gone up, from 15 to 20, then 40, and this year we are offering 50 to any land owner in the State of West Virginia.
Now you can see why we are interested in trying to improve the nut. If we are going to distribute them all over the state, let's distribute a good nut, a nut that is not only a heavy bearer for the game, but a nut, too, that is fit for human consumption.
In our site recommendations we have been trying to follow pretty well the ideas of the boys from Beltsville, and we found out that what they have been telling us is just about right. In other words, we are setting our chestnuts in the cove types, moist with gentle slope, preferably on the north, and we are getting better growth there. It doesn't mean as far as we are concerned that it doesn't grow well on drier land and on rich hill-tops but the growth is so much greater when it's put in good ground and under those conditions. In other words, it needs a tulip poplar site; where tulip poplar is growing or has recently grown might be one way to select a site for our chestnuts.
In these five year now that we have been distributing these chestnuts we have distributed something like 200,000. Now, we know that all of those seedlings haven't been good strains, but they have been the best we could do at that time as we were going along. We hope to learn from you people, and we hope you can give us help in improving our strains so that we can distribute better chestnuts over the state.
We haven't had a good system of checking up, until the present time, on plantings that have been made in the past, but we are initiating a system just now wherein all plantations that have been made from forest stock will have regular examination all over the state of West Virginia, and we are including chestnuts in that. We have made some checks in the state on certain selected sites and have found out, strange enough, that these little plantations that are spotted around on the farms, if they were put in correctly and handled properly according to our instructions, have given us a survival of about 80 to 85 per cent, which is, as you will remember, about the percentage in the Nanking strain planting in Jackson County, 26 out of the 34 original trees. That seems strange, but it has proved true all over the state in the few checks that we have made. But we are going into it and checking these plantations and by so doing I believe we can eliminate a good many of our own troubles, along with your help.
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President Davidson: Thank you, Mr. Quick for a very interesting paper.
Is Professor Moore, present? Our next talk will be on The Present Status of the Chestnut in Virginia, by Professor R. C. Moore of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute of Blacksburg, Virginia. Professor Moore.