The President: Dr. Smith has made a very careful study of fruit trees and knows its effect on them from experiments, but it is well perhaps to consider fruit and nut trees separately.
Professor Smith: I should suggest to anybody who is thinking of working with trees, to get some seedling pecans and plant them and then fertilize some of them and others not, in the same kind of soil. In that way he can get his own fertilizer conclusions at a small expense and then he will know what his own soil needs.
Mr. McCoy: We fertilized seedling pecans in a clay soil and we decided the trees we did not fertilize got along better than the ones we did. Of course that ground is better where the trees are than on the average farm. We used nitrate of soda and potash but we decided the ones we didn't fertilize did the best.
Mr. Potter: I put two pounds of nitrate of soda around each tree and the English walnuts I used it on budded out very shortly after using it, but along about June they died. The pecan trees we used it around grew fairly well, but some of them, one in particular, appeared to remain dormant, almost, until about two months ago when it commenced growing and is now growing very rapidly. So you see I don't know where I am at.
The President: In writing you I did not understand the size of the tree. On some trees I have been using a tablespoonful, about that, and I was afraid I got too much.
Mr. Potter: Evidently I got too much.
The President: Evidently we got mixed up on the quantity. I know I never used more than two tablespoonfuls at any time and I should imagine two pounds would be a big overdose. I remember talking to Dr. Smith about that time about some old apple trees around which you can use five or six pounds of nitrate of soda and I suppose that is the way we got mixed up. I must have had that in mind as I did not intend to advise that amount for young nut trees.
Mr. Pomeroy: How long a season should the tree keep growing? From early spring to late in the fall? My experience is they will stop about the first of August, and let the wood ripen up and harden for the cold weather. Some might keep the trees growing longer, but you will hurt the trees I think.
The President: We have not heard from Mr. Reed yet.
Mr. C. A. Reed: I am glad the discussion has proceeded as it has since it has given me time to reconnoitre. I hardly know what to say on this subject that Professor Smith has brought up. I guess he knows what he is talking about so far as his experiments have taught him. The department does not like to discourage a good thing nor to encourage a thing that is too risky. There is one thing quite sure and that is that so long as nut trees are selling for from one dollar to two dollars apiece, very few people are going to buy them and plant many of them on these hillsides and experiment with them. People cannot afford to do that. We have found, taking the country over, that nut trees thrive best when they are given treatment; that is they must be given cultivation and fertilization; be given some degree of attention the same as an apple or peach orchard. Colonel Sober, however, will show you quite a different thing. He will show you chestnut trees that are not cultivated at all, so there is a staggering blow to my argument, and yet Colonel Sober gets something like three and a half bushels to the tree. You don't fertilize those trees, do you, Colonel Sober?