MR. CALDWELL: It would be physically impossible for me to do so with my constitution, which is what I am trying to apply to the nut trees.
MR. WILKINSON: Don't condemn it over all territories[6]. At my place, the Stabler produces nuts as regular as the Thomas, and in the nursery it outsells the Thomas two to one, if not more. I have handled nut sales for Mr. Weber's orchard, one of the largest black walnut orchards in the United States. When the people come there we will crack a Stabler walnut to make a customer out of them, and we have to get on to something else to keep them from buying all the Stablers first. And if I were planting a hundred walnut trees today, the majority of them would be Stabler. They have been bearing since 1918 when I started producing Stabler walnuts.
[6] The territory giving best reports on Stabler lies along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers from about Cincinnati to no farther south than Memphis.—J.C.McD.
DR. CRANE: That's what we are talking about tonight.
MR. CALDWELL: Yet your committee throws the thing out.
MR. CHASE: I'd like to say a few words. First off, I am in agreement with the idea of some sort of a regional testing set-up.
Now here we are getting into discussion about individual varieties, and that is not the purpose of this, as I understand, but all of you gentlemen have been propagating the various varieties simply because one has become available to you at a certain time, and you have grafted it. Our committee on varieties, of which I am a member, probably should be criticized, because we have not gathered that information from the folks who have grafted trees, and they are scattered over the region. We don't need the regional set-up, it's already set up. In other words, if we have varieties to be tested, we could have selected members in our group to graft it, if they do not already have it grafted. In a few years we can get some pretty definite information on a few varieties.
Now, in 1938, in our work we recognized the advisability of quickly doing something about the 100-and-some varieties existing in the proceedings, and finally we have culled that down to, I think, 43, which, on the basis of nut characteristics only, are very close together. Now, we started out in 1938 and established four or five test plantings containing the first ten varieties. Ten trees of ten varieties, a hundred trees in the planting. It took quite an area.
Since that time we have set out variety test plantings of 43 varieties scattered over seven states at various geographical locations within the seven states.
MR. KINTZEL: How many trees do you have in a planting now?