The year 1936. My last trip to Western Ukraine
In Ontario farmers were slow to grasp the idea of cultivating my Carpathian English walnuts. Either they did not believe the English walnuts could thrive in this Province, or waited till my trees would start to bear. Nevertheless some thousand of my seedlings were planted here and there all over Ontario and smaller quantities in the Maritime Provinces, Manitoba and Alberta. The late Sir Wm. Mulock hired Mr. Corsan to graft with the Carpathian scions tops of many of his black walnut trees in Orillia, Ont. Fred Gaby, the engineer who built the Ontario Hydro, ordered through me from Ukraine 50 to 12 feet tall Carpathians of bearing age and planted them on 10 acres near Cooksville. Ont. Prof. Currelly has bought 25 acres near his estate west of Pt. Hope, Ont. for my use in experimental work. The late Col. McAlpyne planted one thousand of my yearlings on his estate at Fenelon Falls, Ont. Two young farmers, Papple Bros., in the Georgian Bay region also started an English Carpathian walnut orchard. In 1935 I moved my Carpathian walnut nursery from Islington to Prof. Currelly's estate, and Mr. L. K. Devitt sold his lot of the trees through the Dominion Seed Co., Georgetown, Ont.
In the States, Mr. Carl Weschoke, a manufacturer in St. Paul, Minn., who in the year 1935 was elected the President of the Northern Nut Growers Association, also got interested in Carpathians. His son-in-law about that time started a walnut nursery on their estate some 30 miles east of St. Paul. That 1936 year Mr. Weschoke sponsored my expedition to Northeastern Poland (Northwestern Ukraine) to find the geographical line north of which English walnuts do not thrive in Europe.
My expedition was successful. I discovered that northward from the Pripet River, which flows from west to east toward the Dneiper, English Walnuts could not be found. If I had come across there some English seedlings nearer to the Lithuanian boundary and the Baltic Sea shore, they would have been planted there recently and not before the year 1924.
Farther north, though there English walnuts do not thrive, around the
Lake Peipus I came across filberts not as bushes but as large trees.
Every fall peasants in that district go in the woods and bring bags of
filberts for winter use.
Such filbert trees I found also in the Carpathian mountains near the
Ukrainian settlement of Vizhnytza in the Province of Bukovina.
West of the town of Sarny and south of the Pripet I came across a grove of 18 ancient English walnut trees. In the year 1648 when Ukrainian Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytzky led a war against Poland those trees already were 70 years old, and they still were bearing in 1936 when I visited that region. Indeed their limbs were broken and they presented a sad sight, but they proved how long the Ukrainian English walnut could live. The seeds of those ancient trees I also shipped to Mr. Weschcke. Beside that I brought to my sponsors thousands of selected walnut seeds, seedlings and scions.
My English Carpathian walnut tree in the back yard of 48 Peterboro Ave. Toronto, Ont., being planted out there from the pot in the spring of 1922 started to produce nuts in 1929. The nuts were exactly to the type: oblong, pointy, inch and a half long, the shell semi-hard, partitions large, the kernel of pleasant taste. It started to produce female bloom when it was 4 years old, but till 1929 there were no catkins of male bloom.
The crop of the nuts, that year and following years was usually carried away by marauding black squirrels.
Other people who got from us the Carpathian English walnut seedlings reported that their plants also started to bear the seventh year or around that. But the Papple Bros. reported that they had a case when a seedling produced by them straight from the Carpathian walnut bore a nut in the second year of its life. On the other hand there were cases where some Carpathian English seedlings, as well as grafted ones, still produce no nuts though they are 15 years old and over.