The President: Is there any discussion upon the excellent paper just read by our treasurer?
Mr. Jordan: May I ask if, according to that theory, the Stuart and the Schley would not be expected to do well in Washington?
Mr. Bixby: I should say not. My intention was to indicate roughly a dividing line between where the pecan would be an important commercial crop and where it would not. We know the Stuart pecan bears pretty well at Petersburg, Virginia; it bears at Aspers, Pa., which is near Gettysburg, but the nuts are a fraction of the normal size and not very well filled.
The Secretary: We all appreciate the amount of work that is represented by this report of Mr. Bixby and how valuable it is from a scientific as well as from a practical point of view. I wonder if it could be made more useful if Mr. Bixby could make a little map showing the isothermal lines on the basis that he has followed in his investigation.
Mr. Bixby: That could be done in a very general way, but altitude makes such a difference that there would be many places included in any belt at which, probably, certain pecans would not grow nor would not mature. It is very evident that local conditions make a great difference. I should say that a map to be useful would probably have a series of dots all over the country indicating what pecans would be best grown in that section; and while that would, to a certain extent, form belts yet there could be selected many places in any one belt where another pecan would be preferable.
Mr. J. W. Ritchie: I started in this nut-growing business knowing nothing about it. I found that there were men in it who had been working at it for years who knew many things that I wanted to know. They forgot that I knew nothing and that I might want to know some of the things that they had in their minds which gave them a background. I think there ought to be some way by which all this knowledge that we have can be brought together so that a beginner could pay a dollar or a dollar and a half or, if necessary, two or three dollars and get it all at once. I have visited Washington and have seen Mr. Littlepage. He showed me some Kentucky hickories and Stabler walnuts and I then decided that if I could raise any nuts there would be no trouble about selling them. I can sell just as many of those nuts as I can produce; but yet I do not know a thing about how many nuts will grow on a Kentucky hickory in one year. If you will lay the facts before me and let me judge them I will take the risk myself. I do not want anybody to tell me whether to plant nuts or not to plant them. I will decide that question for myself if you will give me the data to work on. I want a book that will give me the varieties. I want to know what particular nuts can be put out in this region here that would have a chance of commercial success. Then I would like to know as much as I possibly can about those varieties, their respective qualities, what they will produce and especially how to propagate them. I happen to have a place where there are a great many walnuts, butternuts and hickories. I would like to know, in detail, how to propagate those nuts. In a conversation with the secretary he spoke of northern pecans. I have read about the Marquardt, the Burlington and the Witte. I do not know whether the term "northern" included those three or not.
Treasurer Bixby: I would be very useful if I could directly answer a good many of the questions that are asked. A great many people would like to know the pecan they can plant in their sections and be sure of success. That I would like to tell them. I do not have the information. It is frequently more difficult to answer questions than to ask them.
Regarding the Burlington and the Witte pecans, they come from the most northern section where good pecans have been found, where the heat units are the lowest. They come from Burlington, Iowa, where the heat units are 180, if I remember correctly. If we assume a place where the heat units are 80 per cent of those at Burlington, those pecans should grow and mature there. They would probably do fairly well in New York City. I think we might feel justified in saying that they would not do well at Charles City, Iowa, because pecans from near that section, or back north of that section, have been growing for twenty-five or thirty years, and have not fruited. There the pecan units are very low, only 78. It would seem reasonable that at places where the pecan units are somewhat over 90, including New York City, Lancaster, southern Pennsylvania, and of course practically all sections south of it, they ought to do well. Those are the safest pecans, the Marquardt, the Burlington, the Witte, and the Green Bay, to plant in the northern section.
Mr. Littlepage: The Stuart pecan originally stood within fifty feet of the Gulf of Mexico. There is where it originated. It is one of the leading southern nuts; and yet I saw a Stuart bearing nuts in Mr. Roper's orchard down at Petersburg, Virginia. It has grown beautifully. There is a strictly southern pecan, nurtured by the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, which has the widest latitude. You can find the same thing up north. The fact that the Burlington grows at Burlington, Iowa, means this, that it ought to grow in all similar latitudes, or else violate known laws of horticulture. But it does not mean that some other pecan that grew 250 miles south of that might not grow still further north. The questions asked are important. Why does not the association, just as fast as it gets information, stick a pin there and fasten it down? For example, will pecan trees grow, say, on the thirty-ninth parallel, which runs through my grove down in Maryland. They will. Will they bear? There is one Major there that has this summer fifty pecans on it; another one there with perhaps a dozen. On the 27th day of March of this year, which was Easter Sunday, the temperature dropped sixty-eight degrees in twenty-four hours. It is a wonder it did not kill the forest trees. But with all that the pecan stood there just as hardy as the oak. It destroyed some of the ends of the swelling buds, not the dormant buds but some of those that had begun to swell a little, and that no doubt affected the crop or we would have had, perhaps, all the varieties, the Butterick, the Warrick, the Niblack, the Busseron, the Major, and the Green River fruiting. Do we want to grow a Major? I do not know. But the man that makes the mistake is the man who fails to set nut trees. How about the Stabler walnut bearing? It bore matured nuts at the age of four years on my farm in Maryland this year. The nuts are here. That answers that question. I have very grave doubts about pecan trees thriving in the Lancaster latitude; yet it may be that I am wrong about that. There may be some particular variety that will thrive here. If I lived in this section I would set out the trees so that when the one, two, three or four varieties are found that will thrive here we will have something to work on. There isn't any question about the black walnut or filbert thriving here, or the hickory, because we find them growing. If you go through southern Michigan and northern Indiana, you will see the shagbark hickory by the thousands growing along the railroad. This association should endeavor to get some affirmative data and distribute it among its members.