I cannot adequately express to you my heartfelt joy at the prosperity of our association. For one thing the great increase in the membership, for another the birth of three branch state associations, but above all the success in the production of nuts. In my time we had mostly, if not entirely, the promising production of specimen nuts only. We had nothing like the Jacobs Persian walnut with its imposing spread and its production of 200 pounds of nuts in one season; Mr. Kyhl's orchard with its many varieties of Persian walnuts; his success in grafting and his reporting of a tree which bears three or four bushels of heartnuts yearly; Mr. Best's 5,000 grafted pecan trees; Mr. Hirshi's chestnuts; the splendid results of the Persian walnut contests; and the almost spectacular increase in the number of nurseries selling grafted nut trees of many varieties. These facts, and many that I have not mentioned, make it certain that nut growing is now a firmly established and surely increasing industry. You may be sure that these facts give me great delight.
Some years ago while I was in possession of a mind as good as it had been at any time, I did a little grafting of nut trees in a commercial way for people at their country places, and I had the nerve to charge them fifty dollars a day. What's more I got paid and never got kicked, nor did I hear mutterings or see scowls. But then, you see, there was no other grafter, of the kind, around my part of the country. Almost a monopoly and, of course, a wicked one. But here my mind goes blank. I can't recall what luck I had with the grafting, nor can I recall the name of a single one for whom I did such work.
I strongly advise every one of you to have a good book in which you keep personal and geographic records of all your work with nut growing. All the details are vividly in your mind now, but when you get to be ninety you may find them, as I do, faded away and all washed up. Please go on with the good work.
Some more good friends have just taken me for a round trip to Litchfield where my little sister, who is 84, has just partly circumvented the squirrels and by going out very early in the morning to the chestnut tree has succeeded in getting a good big double handful of chestnuts, nice big ones.
She also called to my attention a good-sized Persian walnut which she says I once grafted on a black walnut and this year was quite well covered with nuts which she says the squirrels cut off while green, and she says they were helped by one of the black plumaged birds. Some time ago she gave me one of the nuts and I tried to husk it with my knife. But it was too immature. They would have matured this fall, I think but for the pests.
William C. Deming
Sweepstakes Award in Ohio Black Walnut Contest
L. WALTER SHERMAN, Canfield, Ohio
This I believe, is the third report to the Northern Nut Growers Association concerning the black walnut contest held in Ohio in 1946. The first report was given soon after the close of the contest. During the year following the contest (1947), I visited each of the ten prize winning trees, photographing them, and getting as complete a case history of each as was possible.
This, the third report, concerns mainly the process used to determine the winner of the $50.00 sweepstakes award given in 1951 for the best performance of a black walnut tree for a five-year period. The owners of the ten prize-winning trees in the 1946 contest were asked to report the amount of crop harvested each year as well as to send in samples of the nuts for a cracking test.