TUESDAY MORNING SESSION
(Called to order at 8:30 o'clock, a.m., President L. H. MacDaniels presiding.)
Persian Walnuts in the Upper South
H. F. STOKE, Roanoke, Va.
My experience with the Persian walnut has been acquired in the Roanoke district of south-west Virginia. It is located 300 miles from the Atlantic seaboard and my trees are at an approximate elevation of eleven hundred feet. Roanoke is on the same parallel as Springfield, Missouri, and about thirty miles south of Rockport, Indiana.
This experience covers a period of more than twenty years with named varieties and seedlings of the species. I shall here attempt to present some findings that may be of some value to others similarly located.
For the sake of brevity I shall put the cart before the horse, the findings before the facts from which they are derived.
For the upper south and, in my opinion, for the middle west, late vegetating and blossoming is of prime importance for success with the Persian walnut. No matter how vigorous, prolific and precocious the tree may be, nor how fine the nuts, the variety is worthless for anything except shade if the crop is destroyed by normal spring frosts.
In the second place is winter hardiness. This is of two kinds; resistance to extreme cold, and resistance to the wooing of warm winter days that starts premature activity, followed by a destructive freeze.
My experience with the Payne variety is a case in point. Having read some place of the vigor, precocity and heavy bearing of the new variety, then called the Payne Seedling, I secured some scions of it from its originator and worked it on a young black walnut. The variety was already making a name for itself in Northern California and Oregon, not only because of its bearing habits but for the superb quality of its nuts.