Professor Close: I will just take a few minutes in telling some of the things I have been trying to do at home. My work is necessarily on a very small scale. I am away from home so much of the time that some things I start I cannot follow through properly. In grafting, for instance, I get the grafting done as I can do it from time to time in the spring and then I have to leave on a Government trip and am not at home to take care of the growing grafts as I would like to be. While my extension work for the Government is primarily connected with fruit I look into nut work as much as possible. Dr. Van Fleet has given me a number of hybrid chinkapins and this year three of them have fruited for the first time, one being of fairly good size. I have a couple of Japan walnut trees and the surprising thing is that although they were planted in 1910 they are fruiting this year for the first time. Usually those trees begin bearing very early. They have grown rapidly, are probably twenty feet high and have a breadth of equal distance but have been disappointing in that they have been so late in fruiting.
Mr. Littlepage. Do they winter-kill any?
Professor Close: No, they have not winter-killed at all. One was supposed to be a heart nut but both are Sieboldianas. I think the most satisfactory and interesting thing I have is one of these large filberts or hazel nuts. It is a pretty good size for an eastern-grown nut. This is a seedling from New Jersey. I received the scions four years ago and was successful in having three or four of them live and last year they produced for the first time, three years from the graft. They are well filled and of pretty good quality. I have them grafted on some bushes of European type secured from a nursery about 1910, and which until grafted did not fruit at all. After the grafts began blooming last year these bushes have been producing nuts of small size. While the nuts are small they are right interesting.
In connection with the blight resistant chestnuts I will say that last Friday I visited Mr. John Killen of Felton, Delaware. Some of you know that Mr. Killen has been working with nuts for a good many years and has many very interesting things there. He finds that the blight has taken everything except his Japanese seedlings and here (showing specimens) are specimens of two of the Japanese seedlings. This you see is a very large nut. I presume the tree must be twenty years old or more. It is productive and he says it is commercially successful, which means that it blights a little but not very seriously. He has another seedling, a smaller one, that is up to the present time absolutely blight proof. He has planted twenty-five or thirty pounds of these nuts for growing trees for sale and he believes that the seedling from this parent tree will be absolutely free from blight. You will be interested to know that up to the time I was there last Friday he had shipped seven hundred pounds of chestnuts and was receiving twenty-five cents a pound wholesale.
Mr. Littlepage: What is the variety?
Professor Close: They are all seedlings. In fact all of his varieties are dead. He has nothing but seedlings.
Mr. Littlepage: Has that been called to Dr. Van Fleet's attention?
Professor Close: Not that I know of. I doubt if Dr. Van Fleet has seen this blight proof one. I will be glad to tell him about them when I have an opportunity. Mr. Killen has one Japan walnut tree that is interesting. It must be 25 or 30 years old. I do not know where he got it. One limb we measured extends out 36 feet. The limbs on the other side of the tree are not quite so long but the tree is nearly 70 feet in diameter. Two years ago he sold the crop for $54.00, and he thinks he will get more this year. He has contracted the crop to a nurseryman. Mr. Killen has quite a number of seedling Persian walnuts and some of them, perhaps all, blight more or less. He is very much exercised over the blight. He worries more over this than he does over the chestnut blight.
Mr. Littlepage: Does the blight attack the nuts or the twigs?
Professor Close: Both but mostly it attacks the nuts. At Beltsville 4 miles north of College Park there is one of the best seedling walnuts I have run across. It fruits every year and sometimes a part of the crop is injured by blight.