I also bought a dozen Pomeroy walnuts last winter for experiment. They are all alive but the extraordinary late and early frosts were hard on them and nipped them down three inches from the top where they again sprouted out. This occurred to all but one tree which positively refused to take any notice of either the late or the early frost. I consider this one tree worth many times the money I paid for the dozen.
My experiments are only two years old but I will mention that my English filberts or Kentish cob nuts are doing well, also my Battle Creek persimmon seedlings that I planted in an exposed position two years ago.
Seeds from those Battle Creek persimmon trees can be procured from Dr. J. H. Kellogg by writing him. They are the two most northern persimmon trees which I have discovered so far. The fruit is good to the taste and the trees have lived through terribly cold winters. I mention this as many of you are fruit growers also and want to get persimmon stock in order to graft the Japanese persimmon on. The female tree every second year is loaded to the point of breakage and should do well for stock.
Speaking about procuring seeds from dealers, I can get here and there for one cent as much as I have to pay the dealer a dollar for. For instance, while passing through Phoebus, Va., I asked a lady what she wanted for Juglans sieboldiana and she said 5 cents a quart or 35 cents a peck. She only got 16 bushels from a 20 year-old tree! They were bigger and better specimens than I got from Japan at about five nuts for one dollar, postage extra.
Then I wrote to a gentleman who had a small tree of Juglans cordiformis in Ontario and he said that he only had a bushel which he was expressing to me and to send him a dollar! Think, and the Japs sent me three nuts for one dollar!! A lady at Niagara Falls, Ontario, told me that she had a little tree of J. sieboldiana so I asked her the price and she sent me half a bushel and said to pay the express charges which were a quarter!
And it is the same way with these forest seed merchants, they send me for dollars the seeds of pinus edulis and pinus Koriensis that it would take a powerful microscope to discern, and I afterwards bought of a fruit merchant in Milwaukee a big glassful for a nickel!
Roadside planting is a failure, for, besides rodents little and big, there are all kinds of animals from sheep to horses to destroy them, so that I have to plant all my trees at least four feet within my fence line.
Juglans Mandshurica seed I find impossible to procure so far. There are two magnificent trees in Toronto planted by an old man who is dead now. These trees show no sign of ever having been winter killed and are 13 and 19 feet high but have not fruited yet. The leaves are very long and the trees resemble the stag horn sumach, except that they are distinctly Juglans in appearance; but the growth of the year's shoots is thick and long like a coppice growth.
LETTER FROM W. C. REED, VINCENNES, INDIANA
The Indiana pecan tree bore a splendid crop of about 3½ bushels. The Busseron also had a good crop on all the old wood and some on the new wood. The Busseron is just recovering from a severe cutting back by the owner and should be in shape to give a good crop next year. Other pecans in the vicinity bore a very light crop.