Growing Nuts in the North | Page 8

still being paid.
In grafting black walnuts on butternut trees, I very foolishly attempted
to work over a tree more than a foot in diameter and I did not succeed
in getting a single graft to grow on it. Other younger trees, from three
to six inches in diameter, I successfully grafted. Some of these are still
living but clearly show the incompatibility of the two species when
black walnut is grafted on butternut. The opposite combination of
butternut on black walnut is very successful and produces nuts earlier
and in greater abundance than butternut does when grafted on its own
species.

The expense of buying trees by hundreds was so great that after a year I
decided that I could very easily plant black walnuts to obtain the young
trees needed as understocks. When they had grown large enough, I
would graft them over myself. I wrote to my friend in St. Peter, Mr. E.
E. Miller, and he told me where I could obtain walnuts by the bushel.
Soon I was making trips to the countryside around St. Peter buying
walnuts from the farmers there. I planted about five bushels of these at
the River Falls farm and the rest, another two bushels, at St. Paul. Soon
I had several thousand young walnut trees which all proved hardy to
the winters.
When pruning the black walnut trees purchased from Mr. Jones for
transplanting, I saved the tops and grafted them to the young trees with
a fair degree of success. In a few years, I was using my own trees to fill
up spaces left vacant by the mortality of the Pennsylvania-grown trees.
I did not neglect seeding to provide stocks of the Eastern black walnut
also, which is almost a different species from the local black walnut,
but these seedling trees proved to be tender toward our winters and
only a few survived. After they had grown into large trees, these few
were grafted to English walnuts. The difference between the Eastern
black walnut and the local native black walnut is quite apparent when
the two trees are examined side by side. Even the type of fruit is
different, although I do not know of any botanical authority who will
confirm my theory that they are different species. They are probably to
be considered as geographically distinct rather than as botanically
different species.
For several years I continued to graft black walnuts on butternut trees
with the intention of converting hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these
wild trees over to prolific, cultured black walnuts. I did not realize my
mistake in doing this until ten years had elapsed. I believed that since
the tops were growing, the trees would shortly produce nuts. Today
they are still growing, bigger and better, yet most of these grafted trees
bear no nuts, having only a crop of leaves. A few nuts result from these
grafts, however, and some of the trees bear a handful of nuts from tops
of such size that one would expect the crops to be measured in bushels.
The kind which bore the best was the Ohio variety. In another chapter, I

shall relate parallel experience in hickory grafting which I carried on
simultaneously with grafting of black walnut on butternut.
My first big disappointment in my black walnut orchard was when, in
about 1930, having a fairly good crop of nuts, I unsuccessfully
attempted to sell them to local stores. They were not interested in
anything except walnut kernels and to them, a wild walnut kernel was
the same as a cultivated one as long as it was highly-flavored. This so
cooled my enthusiasm and hopes for a black walnut orchard that I
ceased experimenting with them except to try out new varieties being
discovered through nut contests carried on by the Northern Nut
Growers' Association. The 1926 contest produced a number of black
walnut possibilities, among them being such named varieties as the
Rohwer, Paterson, Throp, Vandersloot, Pearl and Adams.
The neglected and over-grown walnut seedlings now began to serve a
useful purpose in grafting the new varieties which I obtained for testing
in this locality. These were propagated by obtaining scionwood from
the originators of the variety and grafting it on these seedling trees. My
technical knowledge had increased by this time to such an extent that I
was usually certain of one-half of the grafts growing. The behavior of
the Rohwer and Paterson in 1937 invited nursery propagation on a
greater scale than did other better-known types, because of their
qualities of hardiness and earlier-ripening.
In the spring of 1937, these native seedlings were again offered to the
spirit of propagation, when a large part of the scionwood of English
walnuts I had imported from the Carpathian mountains of Poland was
grafted on them. The