It has seemed to me that English walnuts from the Carpathian region should thrive well around Toronto.
My Experiments
In my old home I have heard gardeners say: "Where apples grow, walnuts will grow there also." And around Toronto there I have seen nice apple orchards producing splendid fruits. The Ontario apple trees withstood winter colds well, and that fact encouraged me to try to plant English walnuts from Ukraine in the neighborhood of Toronto. At the end of the First World War Ukraine revolted against the Russian Empire and at the same time she was fighting for her independence with Poland.
At that time my father's family lived in the city of Stanyslaviv at the northern foot of the Carpathians. I asked my sister to send me as many local English walnut seeds by mail as she could. Giving such an order to my sister I expected that the nuts would arrive not later than the end of October, just in time to be planted before the freeze up. This was in 1921.
I remembered from my boyhood that planting of English walnut seeds was surrounded by some mystery. It seemed to me that people in Ukraine regarded it as a very difficult matter to cultivate walnut trees.
Being under such a notion myself I asked a horticulturist how long the germination power of a walnut seed would last. He told me that it could prevail in a fresh walnut not longer than a week. He advised me in order to prevent walnuts from drying to dip them in melted parawax. Following that information I wrote my sister to parawax the walnut seeds before sending them to Canada.
Owing to the Polish-Ukrainian war at that time the shipment of the walnut seeds got to Toronto not late in the Fall, as had been expected, but in February when the farm land around Toronto was frozen. And the worst of it was my sister did not parawax the nuts!
Being sure the kernels were dead I allowed the children to do what they pleased with them. But before they cracked the last one my wife advised me to plant a dozen of the nuts in our flower pots, as she said, "for fun". I did it. Other nuts the children destroyed, and in spite of my sorrow and anguish in two weeks the walnut sprouts came up in the pots. Everyone of them came up, proving that you do not need to protect walnut germination by dipping the nuts into melted parawax.
From the flower pots the walnut seedlings were transplanted that spring of 1922 into our city garden at 48 Peterboro Ave., Toronto.
At least a thousand of the kernels of several varieties were thus destroyed and I was obliged to wait until another fall when the Juglans regia nuts were sent again by my sister. They came also late in the winter and were dry as pepper.