Growing Nuts in the North | Page 7

we felt our semi-trailer was in
good-enough order. It might have been, too, if the roads in the country
hadn't been rough and frozen so hard that they hammered on the solid,
unresisting tires and spokes until, almost within sight of the farm, one
wheel dismally collapsed. As the wheel broke, the trailer slid off the

road into a ditch, so that it was necessary to send on to the farm for the
plow horses to haul out the car, the trailer and the trees. The horses
finished hauling the trees to that part of the farm where holes had been
dug for them. I had told my tenant to dig large holes and large holes he
had certainly dug! Most of them were big enough to bury one of the
horses in. Such was my amateurish first endeavor.
It was not until December of that year, 1919, that the twenty-eight trees
were finally planted. Although the ground was already somewhat
frozen and the trees poorly planted as a result, most of them started to
grow in the spring. They would probably be living now if I had not
been too ambitious to convert them from seedlings into grafted
varieties such as the Ohio, Thomas and Stabler, which I had learned of
during a winter's study of available nut-culture lore. I obtained
scionwood from J. F. Jones, part of which I put on these abused trees
and the remainder of which I grafted on butternut trees. At that time, I
must admit, I was much more interested in trying the actual work of
grafting than I was in developing or even conceiving a methodical plan
to be worked out over a period of years.
In order to facilitate my grafting work that spring, I pitched a tent in the
woods and lived there for a week at a time, doing my own cooking and
roughing it generally. Cows were being pastured in this part of the
woods and they were very interested in my activities. If I were absent
for a long time during the day, on my return I would find that
noticeable damage had been done to my tent and food supplies by these
curious cows. While preparing some scionwood inside the tent one day,
I heard a cow approaching and picked up a heavy hickory club which I
had for protection at night, intending to rush out and give the animal a
proper lesson in minding its own business. The cow approached the
tent from the side opposite the door and pushed solidly against the
canvas with its nose and head. This so aggravated me that I jumped
over to that part of the tent and gave the cow a hard whack over the
nose with my hickory stick. It jumped away fast for such a big animal.
This seemed to end all curiosity on the part of these cows and I was
allowed to carry on my work in peace.

With beginner's luck, I succeeded with many of the butternut grafts, as
well as with some of the grafts on the twenty-eight planted black
walnuts. However, all of the grafted black walnut trees ultimately died
with the exception of one grafted Stabler. This large tree was a
monument of success for twenty years, bearing some nuts every year
and maturing them, and in a good season, producing bushels of them.
One other of these seedlings survived but as it would not accept any
grafts, I finally let it live as nature intended.
In 1921, I began ordering grafted black walnut trees, as well as grafted
hickory trees from J. F. Jones, who had the largest and best known of
the nurseries handling northern nut trees. Some of these grafted trees
were also planted at my home in St. Paul, using the two locations as
checks against each other. The site in St. Paul eventually proved
unsatisfactory because of the gravelly soil and because the trees were
too crowded. The varieties of black walnuts I first experimented with
were the Thomas, Ohio, Stabler and Ten Eyck, which were planted by
hundreds year after year. If I had not worked on this large scale there
would be no reason for me to write about it today as the mortality of
these black walnuts was so high that probably none would have lived to
induce in me the ambition necessary to support a plan involving
lengthy, systematic experimentation. Some of these early trees survive
today, however, and although few in number, they have shown me that
the experiment was a worthy one since it laid the foundation for results
which came later. In fact, I feel that both the time and money I spent
during that initial era of learning were investments in which valuable
dividends of knowledge and development are