MR. MAGILL: Going back to an observation I made as a kid, money didn't grow in bushes around our place, and back in those days you could go out and kill ten rabbits and sell them for 8 cents apiece, and if you only used 4 cents apiece for ammunition, you have made 40 cents off of the deal and had $20 worth of fun, and that was a good day's work. You remember those days, Pappy? Back in those same times, I used to get money out of hauling black walnuts to an old corn sheller and having people who didn't have an interest in the corn sheller sell them for 50 cents a bushel. That was also pin money. Come in mighty useful.
We had a certain group of trees on the farm I was raised on that bore every other year, and I can think of two fields where we rearranged the fences in such a way as to make pasture fields out of them, and two of those trees were where 15 or 20 cattle pastured. These were the only shade trees, and naturally they manured those trees. And I recall for a few years I was getting annual crops from them. Apparently they got something supplied by cattle that they didn't have otherwise. Others in the foothills of Kentucky, have come to the same conclusion.
I know a man who has pecan holdings in Alabama. He told me up to the time he got the farm the trees had a few blooms but wouldn't set pecans. He applied 15 mineral elements and claims to have got results from it. I have talked to at least three people in my travelling around who tried the same treatment on pecans, one in Georgia, one in Alabama and one in Mississippi. They reported that they had improved yield on pecans by using complete mineral fertilizer. That's in addition to nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium.
I am foolish enough to think that that nice, young orchard of Mrs. Weber's would make an excellent place to try it. I understand that the trees are not behaving as well as they should. I'd like for Ford Wilkinson to be made chairman of a committee to see that they are fertilized according to some kind of a schedule that could be worked out and do some observing. That is one of the few places I know of in the several states that would be as adequately laid out. I'd like to see a complete fertilizer including nine or ten mineral elements used.
I don't mean spend a lot of money, but you can do a lot of observing for relatively few dollars. I just throw that out as a hint.
I would like to open up this discussion. Mr. Bolten talked a while ago about things he was growing out of the ground, or out of minerals. Everything comes from the ground, and I reckon you'd say this Northern Nut Growers Association is a little like Topsy, it just developed, as the fellow about the weeds. He said they weren't created, they just come all at once. Now I believe that out of this Northern Nut Growers assembly here that we have got some keen observers that might have something on their minds they want to tell us about. Who wants to speak first?
MR. CALDWELL: This is just an observation I am throwing out for the benefit of those who are here. I spent some time in China, and I was interested in the fact that their walnuts there produced yearly crops. In trying to find out why they produced yearly crops, I also discovered that their persimmons, their plums and their peaches did the same thing. The reason for that apparently goes back to their mythology. They believe in signs and doing certain things according to certain seasons of the year, and one of the things that they did was to gather together in the dark of the moon on one particular night at a certain time and beat the living daylights out of these trees with big bamboo clubs. I wouldn't suggest that people here do that, but it's been known to foresters quite a while that by transplanting or severely pruning or girdling trees that you could produce fruits on these trees the following year. Apparently the Chinese so injured the cambium during the severe beating that they have caused that wound stimulus to induce the formation of flower buds for the following year. By so doing in their English or Persian walnuts they did have yearly crops. I have seen this myself, and I checked back to see why. Perhaps they could explain it. The only explanation we made was not fertilizing, but in the wounding of the cambium. Now, perhaps there could be something done of that nature for walnuts, but I wouldn't suggest getting around and beating the trees up.
MR. MAGILL: In that connection, one man in Kentucky got the same answer. He said about five years ago a cyclone came through there and blew the chimney off the house and uprooted a number of apple trees and leaned over three walnut trees, and he said they have borne five crops in succession. Now, this is the same story that you have got there.
MR. STOKE: I'd just like to remark that I think that's a sort of negative approach. I noticed a boy who had an apple tree that was about to die. He girdled it and got a tremendous crop of blossom. You probably have secured the same results. That is one of Nature's ways to perpetuate itself. But I think there a constructive angle in those trees that respond to nitrogenous fertilizer or manure. I believe the secret, if there is a secret, is that a tree in bearing a crop exhausts itself more or less. It recuperates the following year and then is ready to bear another crop. And the way to meet that situation is to fertilize heavily, especially with nitrogen, the season of the heavy crop so that you will have not only enough leaf growth to produce that crop, but to build up nutrients the following year. I believe that will help break the cycle and establish more regularity.
Some trees do that themselves; that is, they will bear a moderate crop every year. I have the Land walnut at home. It bears every year. Certain chestnuts will bear every year, not excessive crops, but Hobson bears a pretty good crop every year. I believe the secret of breaking that on-and-off cycle is to fertilize heavily the year of production not the year of non-production. If you apply nitrogen on the off year you produce perhaps an excess of wood growth that year and overbearing the following year.