The Question of Moisture.
It is not necessarily true that a tree gets a low percentage of the local rainfall because it is not plowed. The last palliation, or is it provocation, that I would throw into the camp of the orthodox and the worshippers of the plow, is the water-pocket, or small field reservoir, draining a few square rods and holding hard by the roots of a tree a few gallons or a few barrels of water which would otherwise run away. I showed this association a number of photographs of these water-pockets last year. Their most extensive American user, Dr. Mayer, considers them successful from the tree's standpoint and profitable from the economic standpoint. Since the great virtue of cultivation is the conservation of moisture, I will submit that this device, worked out and used for three centuries by the olive growers of Tunis, for twenty years by Dr. Mayer, of Pennsylvania, and about the same length of time by Colonel Freeman Thorpe, Minnesota, can from the point of theory and perhaps also from the point of practice, equal tillage on some soils, and with less labor and much greater economy in farm management, for the making of water pots is a job for odd times, the bane of agriculture, and tillage all comes in a pile—another bane of agriculture.
Upon the whole, I think my 21 years of nut loving have run me directly and indirectly into ten thousand hard earned, and as yet, partly not earned dollars. Rather a deep sting for a pedagogue. When the last of my grafted chestnut trees come down next year, I will have little to show for that ten thousand, but an experimental nursery and some experimental trees scattered about the hillside. But the experiments are still interesting. I still have hope, and I still love trees. I am still ahead.
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THE PRESIDENT: I believe every other man here today has defended his thesis. I will not claim any exemption.
DR. STABLER: The President has mentioned the combination of apple and walnut trees. I would like to ask him if he has seen any deleterious effects upon the apple from the proximity of walnut roots. Now, some of my friends in Montgomery county have the idea that an apple tree will not live within fifty feet of a walnut tree. I have, myself, seen a number of apple trees die, apparently because they were neighbors of walnut trees. I wasn't sure that that was the cause of death, but they died, and walnut trees situated in an apple orchard will have a ring of dead apple trees around them. Now that is one case that I know of where the walnut tree acts injuriously upon the vegetation to which it is neighbor. All of the farm crops, wheat, corn, grass, and oats, and rye, etc., seem to thrive just as well under the limbs of a black walnut as they do away from it. In fact, frequently you see the grass greener and more luxuriant right up to the trunk of the tree than anywhere else, but it doesn't seem to be true of the apple. Now, I would like to hear from the President.
THE PRESIDENT: I simply made that as a suggestion and referred to this instance as an illustration of the effect of fertilization on the walnut.
DR. AUGUSTUS STABLER: Well, how are those apple trees doing?
THE PRESIDENT: I had enough trouble without looking for more by mixing walnut and apple trees. The walnut trees are small, merely the growth from stubs repeatedly cut.
The next on our program is a paper by Mr. McMurran, of the Department of
Agriculture, upon the question of diseases of the English walnut. Mr.
McMurran.