DR. CRANE: That's right.
MR. SILVIS: I'd like to make a point. If in your observation you find a tree seedling in your locality that is producing good crops plant that. Don't get one from Georgia. We can take a little bit of advice from the fruit grower, and not plant too much from the south, even though it came from China.
DR. GRAVATT: I'd like to Comment about conditions in Europe with reference to seedlings and varieties. The general practice there is for each little farmer to graft from the best variety in his section, especially in Italy where you find hundreds of varieties.
In Portugal we were all very much impressed with one area where the government has had an active program in persuading the chestnut owners to topwork all their trees to three varieties. These varieties are very good ones, and they are getting a very greatly increased price on account of the high quality and uniformity of the nuts they export.
It seems to me that in the discussion on the Chinese chestnut in this country we have done a little bit of injustice to the seedlings, so far as the discussion has gone. I am in perfect agreement with what's been said about the low production the first few years, but over on the Eastern Shore Mr. Hemming's trees are producing just about as much in the way of a crop as the tree can bear, and the grafted varieties there don't produce any more than his 17 or 18 seedlings.
DR. MACDANIEL: I believe Hemming has some exceptional seedlings in that lot.
DR. GRAVATT: Yes, they are very valuable, don't misunderstand me. After the first ten years you may find a seedling orchard is going to produce a very good crop, tree by tree. We have had a lot of experience, similar to that reported in New York, with grafted trees dying. We get seedling trees dying, too, but I agree that there is more damage from fall freezes, spring freezes and perhaps from straight low temperature winter injury with the grafted trees than with the seedling trees. Furthermore, I am very critical of the tactics of some of the nurseries. They have grafted on seedlings of absolutely unknown origin or mixed origin. They will take a South Chinese variety and graft it on seedlings that for hundreds of years have been grown in North China. That's just inviting trouble. The nearer you can get to having seedling and scion from the same climatic origin, the better off you are. In fact, we have advised growers to get seedlings of the Nanking and graft Nanking on them.
Dr. McKay is doing a lot of good, basic research work on this problem, and he will have more information for us in times to come. I am firmly convinced that we are going to come some day to the grafted chestnuts, especially in the South, because a lot of the southern producers right now are giving a black eye to Chinese chestnuts, because they are shipping lots of mixed nuts, and by the time they get to the consumer half of them are rotten. This will ruin the market. We have been buying some six or seven thousand pounds of nuts to ship to Italy, and we know something about the conditions of nuts when they reach us. There is no quicker way of killing a market than to be shipping in a whole lot of nuts that are going to spoil or are in the process of spoiling when they reach the consumer. Grafted varieties are one way of getting away from this, especially in the South.
MR. WILSON: I am far enough south so that in peach production we often have winters so warm that the trees don't wake up. This question of rest period is quite important with us. We have a warm winter, and the Mayflower peach just keeps on sleeping. Eventually bloom will break, and a little peach will sit up there waiting for the leaf to come out. There is apparently a rest period with the Chinese chestnut there also. The time of breaking of the rest period in my seedling trees varies as much as three to four weeks, and that would lead me to believe that, in the long run, we will have to plant locally adapted varieties.
PRESIDENT BEST: I am sorry that we have to stop this very interesting discussion.