Question: What is the best time of year?
Dr. Morris: I don't know. Some time ago the American Agriculturist said to its readers that there is disagreement about the best time for pruning peach trees. Let us hear from all our readers. So all of the readers wrote expressing their opinions, and the editor said, "Summing up all of the opinions, the entire testimony in the case, we have decided that the time to prune your peach tree is when your knife is sharp." I had always supposed that the best time for grafting was when the buds were first bursting in the spring, always held rigidly to that, and at that time of the year was in a great hurry. I dropped professional work and lost hundreds and even thousands of dollars in order to see this work go ahead; it is more interesting than professional work. And now this year, with this new method, I have grafted right straight on up to the first of August, and everything growing—deliberately, all through the summer. So that now, at the present moment I do not know. A year ago I could have told you. When I first graduated in medicine, I could answer any question in medicine. After forty years of surgery, I am puzzled over a great many questions. It is the same way regarding grafting.
Question: In summer grafting do you remove the leaves from scions?
Dr. Morris: In summer grafting I have used for the most part scions I have kept in the icebox in sawdust. I have formerly put in twenty or thirty tons in my icehouse for my family to use during the summer. Last winter we could not get any ice, and my scions were just as good kept in the sawdust as if we had had ice; and I grafted those scions in August and the grafts are living. I have also cut off the leaves in grafting, but that is new and you can not depend on it,—stop at one tree, cut off a piece of it, and put it on another tree and have it grow. I have never done that until this year, and it does not succeed in a very large percentage. It is not practical. It can be done—I have proven that; but it is not practical. The best way is to use your scions from last year that have been kept in cold storage in sawdust or leaves.
Dr. Kellogg: When should the scions be cut?
Dr. Morris: There is some disagreement about that. Almost all scions may suffer a little winter injury. Some men prefer to cut in the early part of December before we have had any hard winter, then keep them in cold storage during the entire year, moderately moist, or protected in sand, leaves, or stratification. But I have always preferred February myself, cutting them the last of February before the buds begin to start, then put them in sawdust in the icehouse or cold storage, or bury them under a thick layer of leaves. For budding you transfer immediately. In fact, budding technically comes under the same physiologic principles as grafting. In budding I do that work in my place at Stamford, Conn., about the latter part of July or early August.
Dr. Kellogg: Do you use the same method in transferring buds?
Dr. Morris: Yes, I fix them the same way as I do the graft and cover everything with paraffin. I have even had a little short side graft grow using this paraffin method, a graft two or three inches long.
Dr. Kellogg: Tell us about those fatherless walnuts.
Dr. Morris: In the course of crossing the nut trees, we supposed, as a matter of course, that we must always have the pollen from one tree, or from a tree which bore the staminate or fertilizing flowers, in order to develop nuts or fruit of any sort; but on one occasion I covered a lot of Chinkapin female flowers with paper bags; I didn't have pollen enough to go around and left the bags on because I happened to be too lazy or too busy to pull them off. About a month later when I did take them off I found a full set of chinkapin nuts under those bags. They had received no pollen. That was an observation of a good deal of interest. It may have been that they had gone on by what we call parthenogenesis, and we had the children without the father, had the female parent only, the fatherless chinkapin. It sounds sad. I followed up the experiment with other nut trees, and found that not infrequently we may develop fatherless nuts. The effect will be, according to natural law, to intensify the characteristics of one parent. The female which bears this fruit, this child, without a father, will give to that child an intensification of her own characteristics. That will be the effect of parthenogenesis. That may be continued through several generations perhaps; we do not know. It is new, quite new. (Applause).