View of a Yamhill Orchard
In the neighborhood of all these groves, there are hardy, bearing trees that amply foreshadow the future of the larger plantings. Colonel Henry Dosch, the pioneer walnut grower of Oregon, who has experimented rather thoroughly, even goes so far as to claim that rocky soil is not objectionable, providing there is no hardpan.
In this, as in all other horticultural pursuits, naturally the richer soils are best; but the industrious horticulturist, by cultivation, fertilization, and proper care, can produce a fairly good grove on unfavorable lands. However, so much of Oregon is favorable by nature that growers will hardly undertake to enrich the few less desirable areas for a good many years to come. Land that on the Atlantic slope would be seized readily enough, in Oregon is passed by, as there is still so much untouched that nature has made ideal. Years hence growers accustomed to the less fertile conditions of the far east will undoubtedly turn their attention to even the few poorer areas in Oregon, and make of them glowing garden spots.
It is a simple matter to determine the presence of hardpan; you have but to make a series of tests—four or five to the acre—with a plumber's auger; and this care should be taken in every area where soil conditions have not been fully determined.
PLANTING
Gather the walnuts during the fall or winter, fall is better, and put them in boxes about the size of ordinary apple boxes, putting in first a layer of sand (the sandy loam along the valley streams is excellent) about four inches deep, then a layer of walnuts about the same depth, then cover these over with three or four inches more of sand. Place these boxes out in the weather on the ground where the water will not rise in them. The reason for putting the walnuts in boxes instead of beds, as advised by some planters, is that the boxes may be taken to the field or nursery and the nuts lifted carefully from the sand and placed where they are to grow. It sometimes happens in a wet and backward spring that the walnuts will sprout before the ground is ready for planting, in which case they must be handled with the tenderest care and not exposed to the atmosphere any longer than can be helped.
One grower had a bed of hybrid black walnuts. The season was late and when the ground was ready for planting many had started to grow. He engaged some boys to grabble out the nuts from the sand beds, urging care, but many of the best were broken and injured. Some of them had sent down a taproot nearly or quite three inches in length. These early ones, under proper conditions, are the most vigorous and surest growers, but in the treatment they received many were injured and killed.