The Chairman: Then the length of the bud is not of great importance?
Mr. Rush: No, it is of no importance at all.
Mr. Reed: This slide may be a little bit misleading. Two nuts matured in the nursery on a scion that was inserted in February. The scion was taken from a mature tree and the fruit buds had already set and had enough nourishment to carry them through the season so that they matured. That is no indication of what may be expected in the way of bearing. It is one of the freaks. This is merely a view of a fourteen-year old pecan orchard in south-western Georgia, a 700-acre orchard owned largely by one person. That is the orchard belonging to Mr. G. M. Bacon, a name probably familiar to some of you. Those trees are set 46 feet, 8 inches apart, each way. There are twenty trees to the acre, just beginning to bear now. That photograph was taken some two years ago showing the first step in topworking. The top has been removed, as you notice, and the next slide shows the subsequent water-sprouts which are later budded. The lower branches were left in the first place to take up the sap while the new head was in formation. They have now been removed. Our next point might be brought out in connection with this slide. One of the typical, sub-tropical storms, not unusual in the Gulf States, swept over this area in September, just as the nuts were beginning to mature and defoliated the trees and whipped off the nuts. The sap was still in circulation, and the varieties that respond most readily to warm weather, that start earliest in the spring, sent out new leaves, so that foliage was foliage that ought to have come on the next year, that is, it was exhausting next year's buds. The same year the tree sent out its blossom buds, so it had no fruit the following season. This slide shows one of the pests in the pecan orchard, the twig girdler, at work. The insect deposits its egg under the bark up at about that point, then goes down below girdles the twig, and it breaks off, goes to the ground, and the insect comes out, goes into the ground and comes out the next season. There are a good many drawbacks that are occurring and more are to be expected the same as with other fruit. There are probably no more setbacks to pecan growing than there are to the growing of other fruit, but this is one of the things. This orchard was set in land bordering the Flint River and at the time this picture was taken the water stood at the depth of three feet. It probably did no harm, because it didn't stay more than a week or ten days. Sometimes it stays longer and in such cases it is a serious matter. In Texas, floods come up like that into the branches of the trees, so high in some seasons after the nuts are formed, that the nuts deteriorate and fall to the ground. In such cases it is a pretty serious thing. (Applause.)
The time for which the "scenic" was engaged having expired, the delegates returned to the Court House and the regular program was resumed.
The Chairman: We will next hear from Mr. Lake.
Mr. Lake: My topic, aside from the slides, was concerning the result of the work at Arlington this year. It is all written out but I don't propose to read the paper at this stage. I have not been a teacher and lecturer for 25 years for nothing, and I don't propose to kill the few friends I have among nut growers by talking them to death when they are hungry and want to see something interesting. I will send this paper in due time to the secretary, and give way now to Mr. Jones. I did want to show you on the slides a few illustrations of cross fertilization between the Japanese and the American walnut, but we will put those in engravings and put them in the Northern Nut Growers' Journal, so that you will see them there with better satisfaction. Now one or two words about these Persian walnuts. These are eastern grown seedlings, the best that I have been able to pick out. Here is an Oregon grown nut. That is the ideal type for dessert walnuts. This is the Meylan. There is only one better, and that is the real Mayette, of which we grow very few in the United States, but we are growing considerable of the Meylan. Whether we can grow this successfully here or not, I am not certain, but it is well worth trying. The better type of our nut seedlings in the east are from the Parisienne. We must get a nut something like this that you can crack between your fingers, not one that is sealed so hard that it requires a hammer, and must get one with a very good quality of meat. One great advantage to the walnut grower in the East will be that he can get his crop on to the Thanksgiving market, which is the cream of the market—something the Western or European nut grower cannot do. So if we can grow a nut reasonably fair in quality we can expect excellent results.
The Chairman: Mr. Jones, will you give us your points now?
Mr. Jones: Dr. Deming yesterday asked me to give a little demonstration of grafting and I have brought along a sort of transplanted nursery on a board, so that I might do so.
(Here Mr. Jones demonstrated methods of grafting the pecan.)
The Chairman: Tell us about the wax cloth, Mr. Jones.