Please note that our remarks in regard to the commercial possibilities of these various nuts has reference to our farm at Westfield and to no other place.
I regret I am not going to be at your meeting to endeavor to answer any question which might be asked.
Discussion of Mulches
DR. ANTHONY: Mr. Sherman and I were there a few years ago, and he has very definitely given up the heartnut and black walnut. Many trees in this area are affected with this bunch disease, which caused failure to set, and he has very definitely decided that he is out of those two nuts.
MR. FRYE: That sawdust, how old must it be, and how green have you used?
DR. ANTHONY: We have used sawdust in our fruit tree work. There is a period when I don't like it. When it's raw and going down, it uses a good deal of nitrogen. Also, if it gets dry, it will blow. Also when it gets dry it will run off with the water, and I would like to use it pretty well rotted down when I get it, and usually you can find old rotted piles. If you do use it on trees where nitrogen is a factor, you probably will have to use additional nitrogen.
Now, with the chestnut where you want to mature them fairly early in the fall, it might work all right, because it will withhold the nitrogen in the breakdown of your sawdust. But apparently, it works pretty well. I think it was Mr. Sam Hemming who suggested using it in the rows. Most of our State Forests and Waters nurseries in their seedling beds, plant their seedlings, including chestnuts, make a mixture of sawdust and sand, about one of sawdust and two of sand, and then broadcast that right over their seeds. The seeds are broadcast on the firm soil, then this mixture of sawdust and sand is broadcast over the seeds. That gives a uniform planting of your seeds and gives a very nice protection. There is one place that I think sawdust works very nicely.
Straw mulch, any material of that kind, in breaking down takes nitrogen from the soil. They are all good if you balance that loss of nitrogen that is lost during the period of breakdown. Now, there comes a time, if you put a mulch on the soil and let it stay there for six or eight years and keep building it up, when you pass imperceptibly from straw into soil, and when you reach that time, your breakdown of your straw is usually done without taking nitrogen from your soil itself, and from that time on you may release nitrogen. But until you get that imperceptible transformation from straw to soil, there is a time when the breakdown of the straw uses your nitrogen, which is all right, if it's late in the season, but not early. I'd want to watch my trees and get my nitrogen on early, then let the straw use it later on.
A MEMBER: The migration of nitrogen—is there some such migration, and is it just in the case of the sawdust?
DR. ANTHONY: You put it right on top, it's much worse. You can put it right on top and it will take a year or two to pass through that period where the utilization in the breaking down of the straw is greater than the release of nitrogen. If it's mixed in the soil, the tree gets more of it.