MR. M. P. REED: Mr. President, we have that condition in the nursery row.
MR. LITTLEPAGE: Well, those are grafted, are they not?
MR. M. P. REED: Grafts and buds, both.
DR. MORRIS: In regard to the grafting of the Persian walnut upon black walnut stock. In Connecticut, we have three species of mice—the common field mouse, the pine mouse, and the white-footed mouse. These mice all follow in the holes of the moles, and they are very fond of the bark of the Persian walnut, and will destroy a good many of them. Now, with the black walnut, on the other hand, when one of these mice comes along and takes a bite of that, he shuts one eye, cleans his teeth, and then goes on to something else. (Laughter.)
Now, in our country the soil is practically all acid. The black walnut will grow in pretty acid soil. The Persian walnut almost demands a neutral or alkaline soil. So, for Connecticut there is no doubt that we really need the black walnut stock for the Persian walnut.
THE PRESIDENT: Any further problems that are vexing the orchardist with regard to the Persian walnut? If not, I think this is a suitable time to bury it until next year. Col. Van Duzee, a man who has had more experience with the pecan than almost any one else in the room, has kindly consented to make his contribution at this time. Col. Van Duzee.
COL. VAN DUZEE: There is a longing on the part of a large percentage of men and women that I meet to escape from conditions which do not seem to be especially favorable in the large cities, and to get away into the safety of the country. I believe that nut tree growing offers one of the safest of those outlets. I believe that a nut orchard should be a part of a general farming operation. I want to give you my ideas about inter-crops. Fifteen years ago the doctors gave me three months to live, drove me out of my business, and away from my home to prolong the agony for a few weeks or months, and I found, among my orchard trees, a reasonable amount of health which, to me, repays a greater value than I could reckon in dollars and cents. It has given me the privilege and the opportunity of removing myself from the turmoil of the city and the conflict of the business world to a peaceful, quiet existence, that, to me, is very much more satisfactory. Now, that is an inter-crop.
Down in Florida, when we used to get together in our citrus seminars and in our horticultural and agricultural meetings we used to try and make a man say on what class of soil his home or orchard was located, so that we might get his viewpoint. For the successful nut orchardist, in a small way, must, of necessity, be a successful agriculturist. He must understand soils. You can't have successful inter-cropping without understanding soils, and, therefore, I can't tell you definitely what would be good for your northern soils. But I can tell you this, that the first thing to do when you have an orchard problem to consider is to make an exhaustive survey of the character of the soil. If it is a fresh, recently cleared piece of fertile soil, under favorable conditions, I am satisfied you don't need very much in the way of inter-cropping. On the other hand, if you select for your orchard site a piece of land that has been worked to death, I believe it would be well to inaugurate a system of inter-cropping that would have for its object the building up of that soil and the improvement of the environment for the roots of those trees. In the South, we are favored with twelve months of growing weather. We plant our crops throughout the year. I am just about beginning now to plow for my oat planting. I am going to pasture those oats all winter with hogs and cattle. We will harvest our oats in May. We then follow them with a legume which will restore the fertility to that soil. In the present condition of the market for commercial fertilizers, I believe we have gone beyond the point where any man can afford to use commercial fertilizers to any great extent on ordinary crops. I believe it is possible to go too far in the stimulation of a growing orchard. My opinion is that a series of inter-crops that results eventually in a large deposit of nitrogen, such as we get from several leguminous crops plowed under, will have a tendency to bring that orchard into a condition—I am speaking now, you understand, of the pecan—-where it will be susceptible to disease and winter-killing.
If you have followed me as far as I have gone in this, you will begin to see at once that the men who are going to be successful in solving these problems are the men who are going to learn the game. Among the human family, you know, we have a stock phrase that we use sometimes when a man dies and we don't understand the cause of his death. We say "He died of heart failure." That is a convenient thing to hide behind. "Winter-killing," to my mind, is another such term. It is used, for instance, in a case where an individual tree, for some reason or other not quite understood, "passed away." (Laughter.)
I have been fifteen years in the growing of pecan trees in the South, and I am free to confess that the most disturbing element in my life at the present time is the fact that we "have known so many things that weren't true." We have gone ahead fully believing that our course was justified, that it was well digested, desirable in every way, and suddenly waked up to find that we were radically wrong, or, at least, that there was a very open question as to whether we were not absolutely wrong.