MR. O'ROURKE: I believe if you get 10 nut people together, you are going to have eight or nine propagators. It is the one thing that people like to dream and talk about.
I went through the list a little bit, and in order to save some time I wrote a resumé of what had been done. In order to accumulate that material I had to dig into some of the more or less unused volume. There is a wealth of information in some of those earlier reports of the Northern Nut Growers Association.
MEMBER: You can get them for $15 a set.
MR. O'ROURKE: It's a good investment anyway. At any rate, I think I am going to try to make a bit of an analogy. Suppose this was a church group who had been working on paying off their mortgage. Every once in a while they passed a hat, but instead of dumping that hat on the table they let those contributions accumulate, so that after a while they had the accumulation of 41 years in the hat. Someone has to dump the hat sometime and I tried to do that this summer, and I found all sorts of contributions in that hat. We might say this happened to be the hat. You would find some brand new fresh ten dollar bills, nice new currency, and then you would find some gold pieces (before Roosevelt). They too can be used because they can also be converted. Then you could dig back and come across some stuff, and you didn't quite know what it was. It might be a Spanish doubloon or an old brass button. Right there is where you need a little knowledge. You should be able to tell the difference. I don't know whether I was able to tell that difference. We will, of course, find a lot of slugs and buttons and this and that among the valuable pieces, so possibly we should sift those out and put them in the discard. You never can be sure what to discard.
Just as I said, every nut grower is a propagator at heart. A little wee paragraph may be a lead to something which would be of quite a lot of value.
This little brief resumé I passed around yesterday, and now this morning I am using my school teacherish techniques in passing around a sheet of paper. There is merely an outline. Pardon me if I insult your intelligence in getting out that outline. As you notice, we start out with the seedling and end with nursery practice. This outline should fit almost any nut species. It should fit chestnut, hickory, walnut or any. I thought it might be best to have a vote as to which one we talk about first, and then we will run down each particular species. I think we should have our panel come up front.
As I said a while ago, we know that practically every person in this room is a propagator. In order that we have this panel conducted in an orderly way, please raise your hand when you speak. I will get the question and pass it to one of the panel members. Which one shall we take up first?
MR. McDANIEL: Let's take the hard one first, the Chinese chestnut.
All right, chestnut. To be systematic, let's talk about seed. Anyone having any difficulty? No trouble at all. Who grows most of the Chinese chestnuts, germinates most of the seed?
MEMBER: I have trouble with rabbits, squirrels, ground hogs.