Nut Puttering in an Off Year

By W. C. Deming, Connecticut

I did manage to get over to Avon Old Farms, the boys' school, and topwork a few hickory trees. All grew, about a dozen, except three scions of one kind that I put in one tree. This is the third year that I have grafted hickories on the grounds of this school, some three thousand acres. The school was planned and built by Mrs. Theodate Pope Riddle, and I was told there that it cost seven million dollars. It is a beautiful and original group of buildings in the lovely Farmington River Valley, well worth visiting.

Mr. Sperry the science teacher, is deeply interested in the nut trees. Dr. Arthur Harmount Graves and I have both given him a number of chestnut trees, and I have added a variety of others, walnuts, persimmons, papaws, pecans, filberts and others as well as the topworked seedling hickories. The trees have been given reasonably good and intelligent care. Many trees were badly winter killed or injured last winter when the temperature dropped to twenty-four below zero in Hartford, official, and is said to have reached forty below in Litchfield county. Japanese chestnuts were especially badly injured. But hybrids having an American strain seemed generally to be little injured. Filberts also showed bad injury. Pecans, persimmons and a papaw seemed to have weathered the winter, though they should be further observed before deciding. The nut trees have been set out in orchard form over tracts of a number of acres and well fertilized. The land is good.

Incidentally Mr. Sperry expressed the thanks of the school with more than one bottle—of fine maple syrup which he and the boys make every spring.

The mollissima chestnut tree in my yard at Litchfield, which Dr. Graves considers remarkable because it bears a moderate crop of fertile nuts every year without apparent benefit of outside pollination, was stripped almost bare of branches by an ice storm. It had reached thirty five feet in height, mainly, perhaps because pretty well surrounded by taller trees. Now it has to start over again from a much lower height. It bore a few nuts on the remaining branches this year.

On account of the restrictions on driving I did not visit Mr. Beeman at New Preston, but he wrote me that he had a few quarts of hickory nuts, chiefly Glover from one of his large topworked trees. He has a couple of acres set out to grafted hickories, some of which have been bearing for several years. Pretty good for a man now 86 who began nut growing less than ten years ago and who has serious physical handicaps. He is the man, as many of you do not know, who, when he began with nut trees, built scaffolds 40 feet high about each of two hickory trees in his yard, and topworked them almost to the last branch by a method of his own One reason for his success is that he is a violin maker with a record of perhaps fifty violins, violas and 'cellos, and he makes his own tools. He is a modest man whom it is a privilege to know.

I have had some interesting experiences with papaws this year. For the first time I have succeeded in growing the seed intentionally. The only other time when I have had seedlings was when a bunch of them came up by themselves in the yard as thick as hair on a dog. Last year (1942) in the fall, I scattered a lot o£ seed in a perennial bed and poked them in with a cane and also in a reentrant angle of a house looking to the northeast, behind some rather luxuriant Christmas roses (helleborus niger) where there wore also lilies-of-the-valley and jack-in-the-pulpits and the soil had been rather heavily enriched. In both places the papaws came up quite freely, especially in the angle of the house where the sun struck only a short time each day. The chief reason, however, was probably the rich, deep soil. These seedlings with taproots 6 to 8 inches long were easily transplanted with their leaves on. I brought four of them to St. Petersburg, Florida. They are said to be native in upper Florida.

Dr. Zimmerman, who was our authority on papaws, said that he thought hand pollination was necessary for good crops. I have been making observations on this for several years and in 1942 obtained confirmatory results. Last spring (1943) I hand-pollinated a tree about 18 feet high using pollen from a number of other trees. This was the same tree on which I had had good results in 1942 over the limited part of the tree that I had been able to reach from the ground. This year I used a stepladder. Also, because the tree was close to a tool house, on the grounds of the park superintendent, I was able to reach the top of the tree from the roof of the tool house. From this tree I gathered about 100 fruits, all but two perfect, weighing together 23 pounds. There were several bunches of three and four and one of six. The quality I did not think as good as some. But it seemed a pretty good demonstration of the value of hand pollinating.

In the yard of a house in Hartford, belonging to the widow of a high school classmate of mine, I found a number of papaw trees, some of them as big as they often grow, perhaps forty feet high and up to a foot in diameter. The lady told me that they used to bear abundantly when her neighbor just over the fence kept bees. Since these are gone she has had very few or no fruit at all and the squirrels got them, if there were any. I pollinated a lot of blossoms that I could reach from the ground and in the fall they were quite loaded with clusters of fruit, but much smaller than those on the first tree described. They were, however, of better quality. There was also a small number of fruit in the high branches of the trees and some of these the squirrels cut off, but apparently just for fun as I did not see any sign of their eating them.

I am writing this in St. Petersburg, Florida. I boarded first with a man who describes himself on his card as a tree surgeon doing grafting and budding, spraying, fertilizing and pruning. This year he took the agency for the Mahan pecan and has sold quite a number at $5 each, with one order for twenty trees. These are put out by the Monticello, Florida nursery. The history of their buying the Mahan pecan tree, and a picture of the parent tree in its original home, is given in the files of the American Nut Journal, an index of the seventeen volumes of which I completed this year. Mr. Stewart sets out all the trees he sells and is meticulous in doing so. Nearby is a good sized Mahan tree with still quite a crop of nuts (in November) after a good many have been gathered. Mr. Stewart speaks well of this pecan tree as a good bearer, with nuts well-filled and of good quality. I haven't cracked enough of them to verify these statements but they are offered by the Monticello Nursery in fifty-pound lots. They sell at Webb's in this city for 65 cents a pound. Schleys I believe sell for 45 cents at the same place. The Mahan is, I think, the largest pure pecan, about a third larger than the Schley and those I have seen were equally thin-shelled. I mention this because I had supposed that pecans did not do well as far south as this. Yet I see many trees about the city, some with fair crops on them and some in good foliage, though many, or all of them I have observed, are partially defoliated by the fall web worm. I saw one fine tree that I was told was a Stuart. The Moneymaker also is said to do well here. I speak particularly of the Mahan because it has not, so far as I know, had the unqualified approval of the experts. But what has? And I don't know that it deserves it.

It is a joy to be among the many citrus fruit trees, the guavas, papayas, avocadoes, loquats, surinam cherries, new and strange fruits and flowers of many kinds in Florida. The Australian or Queensland nut, Macadamia ternifolia, grow and bear well here, I am told—but the squirrels got all the nuts! But the greatest joy of all is the freedom from ice and snow.