Professor Craig: What method do you employ?
Mr. Wilcox: Side grafting.
Professor Craig: Do you mean whip grafting?
Mr. Wilcox: Side whip grafting.
Doctor Deming: I would like to ask Doctor Morris what he thinks of the practical future of grafting our hickory seedlings with improved varieties of hickory or pecan, and the method most likely to succeed,—whether grafting or budding, and at what season. It is important to learn whether we can so graft or bud our hickory sprouts that within a few years we can hope to get something from them.
President Morris: We can only make a parallel with the pecan. If we know that it requires fifteen or twenty years for coming into bearing as a seedling tree, and if we know that it bears frequently in two, three, or four years after being grafted we can anticipate analogous action with other species of hickories. I haven't been able to get testimony from men who have grafted hickories. One man told me he thought shagbark grafted upon other shagbark, topworked, came into bearing in seven or eight years. Another man told me that his came into bearing in a much shorter time than it would otherwise, while with one particular variety, the Hale, I think that twelve years has been required for the tree to come into bearing.
Doctor Deming: I have a communication from Mr. Hales in which he speaks of a tree grafted in 1880, but doesn't say when it began to bear.
Mr. Littlepage: He told me it has taken some of them twenty years.
Doctor Deming: But the pecan on hickory has been known to bear the second season, that is, topworked. Can we expect such results in topworking our own hickories?
Mr. Littlepage: I think so.