My job is not to keep them to myself but to put out the best. So we have those different nuts, and now it is time to consolidate the best in what we have and get them in the hands of the nut growers groups and those who will put them out and really make use of them. But first we want to see these best trees all over the country. Some of them are not as good for timber as the others, but I like to incorporate the timber with the nut production.
We talked about the black walnut earlier today. The speaker was not saying much about flavor. That's one thing we want to do in all of our nut work, get as good a flavor as we can. So why not get the best and go putting it out to give it to everybody. Why keep anything within ourselves? That's the main thing we can do.
A brother was talking a while ago about this nut job, a community nut job. Now, two years ago—I will have to use my dad, who is 82 years old, as a little reference—my dad cracked 83 pounds of black walnuts from just the best of them, you might say. Sold them at a price of $1.49 a pound. So that wasn't bad, was it? I thought that was right good.
Last year we didn't have a nut in there because we had a freeze on the 31st of May of around 26° to 28°, depending on where you were and the location. But then in the fall on the 23rd of September we had another drop just when everything was in full growth, due to a dry spell and then a rain. But in the fall on the 23rd of September we had a drop down to 20, so that was what happened to all the remaining nuts in that country. They were just frozen like black mummies.
I had what they call the Texas Thinshell black walnut. I have one tree that is about eight or nine feet high, maybe ten feet high, had 45 nuts on it, nice big ones, and they just looked like mummies, and it made me heartsick, of course. I went out there and looked at the things, and they fell off the tree. I thought, "Well, I might just as well experiment. I will dig me a little trench here along the garden, I will put these in and see what happens." To my surprise 20 of them came up after being frozen. So that might be a question: Will things sprout or germinate without reaching maturity?[17] I don't know how much maturity they had. They certainly weren't in full growth when they were frozen. That's one thing we want to see.
My main aim is just to grow things, for hobby purposes and see just what will grow. Last year we had such a hectic year from that late spring freeze and early fall freeze it discouraged me here where I am, in this frost pocket at an elevation of 1,050 feet. And I said, "Now, on the hill about 4 miles away and 300 feet higher they have a wonderful place for peaches." I have a friend who lives up there, and he has so many peach trees missing in his old orchard. I said, "How about setting out some nut trees in your peach orchard?" Ho said, "Go to it." I set out a nut tree wherever there is a peach tree out. So that gave me a chance to see what they would do. Last spring I started that too late, but I set out 45 or 50 trees, filberts, Persian walnuts, pecans, chestnuts and persimmons, and I will just see what they will do.
And today my kind friend who gave a talk on the nut trees from down in Alabama gave me seed to plant. I expect to put a row of those out and see what they will do. The land I am planting them on at one time was just a great mass of chestnuts, and this friend there on one of those sections, of about three acres, had cut 35,000 feet of this dead timber after the chestnut blight killed them.
That blight was a terrible shock to us. One thing I did note when it came on, prior to the chestnut blight in that country there were these little chipmunks, which, everybody knows, eat chestnuts. You couldn't hear yourself think for the little chipmunks chipping all over the country. You know, they carried off all the nuts. You had to be smart to beat them to them. When the chestnuts disappeared, the chipmunks disappeared, and there were eight or ten years when you were lucky if you got to hear one. In the meantime those little fellows have changed. They died, a lot of them, but now they have learned to eat something else, and now they are coming back.
That little chipmunk always amused me, because I loved to go out and play with the squirrels and things like that. Anyhow, it's just pure hobby work, and as Mr. Shadow says you can get over a mad spell and get out close to nature, because in this nut work you can't get any closer to God's work than to get out and get something better. I think that's all I have to say.
[Footnote 17: Some other members have reported similar behavior of frost-bitten and poorly filled black walnuts.—Ed.]