The President: Mr. W. C. Reed, you have something on the program and we will be glad to hear from you now.
Mr. Reed: I had prepared a short paper on top working the black walnut with the Persian or English walnut but I won't read the paper on account of the limited time, for there are others here we would rather hear from. Quite a number of you are going to Vincennes and you can ask questions there and understand it better than I can tell you here. However there may be some that can't go along, so any questions you want to ask at this time I will be glad to answer.
Mr. Potter: It will be impossible for me to go to Vincennes on Saturday as I have to go home tomorrow night. I would like to ask Mr. Reed if the method of grafting the pecan is the same as top working the black walnut?
Mr. Reed: Yes sir. Suppose this is a large tree twelve, eighteen or twenty inches in diameter. We cut the limbs back to where they are four or five inches in diameter and, supposing that we want to graft this limb here, we will cut it up here one or two feet because it is hard to cut limbs without their splitting. Sometimes they will split on both sides. For that reason we cut them high and then again, later, back to where we want to graft. We usually find it best to do the first cutting back along the latter part of February or first of March, and when it gets time to do our grafting we cut them off again about two inches so that we shall have fresh wood. We saw them with a fine tooth saw. We prefer to do our grafting from about the first to the tenth of May. We keep scions in cold storage. I think that is quite an advantage although I haven't tried the walnut in cold storage until this year and hadn't thought very much about it until the last few years: but we find the ones we were most successful with were the ones we had kept in cold storage.
Professor Smith: What time were they cut?
Mr. Reed: In February, I think, but I think it would be much better if they were cut in November or early December, especially the walnut, and I shall do that this year. With the pecans I don't think it will make any difference.
Professor Smith: What temperature in storage do you use?
W. C. REED
Vice-President of the Northern Nut Growers Association