But let's dispense with this pecan and say that we believe in the old adage that one raindrop doesn't make a shower. It has a fair crop this year, and they are just as green as my Stuarts now.
There is another tree that originated in West Tennessee which Mr. McDaniel chose to call this nut "Rhodes heartnut." This tree is 7 years old from a dormant bud on a 2-year-old black walnut seedling growing on my back yard. It bore two clusters its second growing season, and since that time it has borne annually, the crops increasing in proportion to the size of the tree. This year's crop consisted of 88 clusters of nuts, with an average nut count of 10.2 nuts per cluster, giving a total of almost 900 nuts on this 7-year-old tree.
There is one more figure I'd like to give you. The count of clusters compared to the number of terminals we had this spring is better than 90 per cent clusters. I have a few bud sticks here cut from green water sprouts. That's the only kind I can find a sprout on. I brought them up to Mr. McDaniel. If anybody can talk Mr. McDaniel out of a bud he wanted to try, but I don't really know what plans he had for these bud sticks. The 7 or 8 other varieties of heartnuts I have growing don't have any that have clusters like the Rhodes.
Scab Disease in Eastern Kentucky on the Busseron Pecan
W. D. ARMSTRONG, University of Kentucky, Princeton, Kentucky
MR. ARMSTRONG: Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen: It is nice to be here at the Northern Nut Growers meeting. This is my second session. I attend all the pecan and nut sessions in the country. I have attended Georgia-Florida Pecan Growers Association and Oklahoma and Texas Pecan Growers Association.
These plates that I have contain some of the Busseron pecans affected with pecan scab. The disease has shown up in Southeastern Kentucky, about a hundred miles southeast of Lexington, a hundred miles west of the Virginia line, and about a hundred miles north of the Tennessee line, on a straight line west of Roanoke, Virginia.
These trees were planted in bottom soil, rather well drained, and they made a rapid growth. In the original planting there were two Green River pecans, one Major, one Busseron and two walnuts, a Stabler and a Thomas.
About 1946 we noticed that all of the pecans on the Busseron were like these that we have here—did not mature, completely covered with scab fungus and dropped off the tree. The shells were so thin that you could just crush the whole pecan, hull, shell and all with no meats in them. The Major tree right beside it and the two Green River trees had none of this trouble, and they have none of it as yet. And each year now that this Busseron tree has borne there, practically all of the nuts have been like this.
At the time we located this disease first in 1946, I sent samples to the
U.S.D.A. at Washington and also to the Southeastern Pecan Laboratory at
Albany, Georgia, and Dr. Cole, there identified it as pecan scab.