48 



Lindsay & Curr at nine dollars a bushel. If he could get a crop 

 every year at that price I think he would be making pretty good 

 money. I would class that orchard as a failure. 



Last week, however, I had the privilege of seeing a walnut 

 orchard that certainly surprised me greatly, I went to Lockport at 

 the invitation of our very enthusiastic member, Mr, Pomeroy, to see 

 the Pomeroy orchard, and I saw several trees heavily loaded with 

 good sized nuts. Mr. Pomeroy estimates that he will have in the 

 neighborhood of six or seven thousand pounds of nuts. The trees 

 look healthy and show no evidence of 'disease. As I understand 

 some of the trees are fifty years of age and there have been only 

 two crop failures in that time. My idea is that the Pomeroy walnut 

 is very hardy and of unusually fine strain. I believe that there is 

 little hope for the commercial development of the English walnut 

 much north of the fortieth parallel. I believe there will be some 

 instances found, like that of the Pomeroy nut, where the seedling 

 will do very well. It certainly has done very well with him. The 

 Avon orchards are seedling trees, of course, the nuts having been 

 gotten from a residence on Lake avenue, Mrs, Cramer's, at the cor- 

 ner of Emerson street. Evidently that strain is entirely different 

 from the strain of nuts represented by the Pomeroy orchard which 

 were brought from Philadelphia by Mr. Pomeroy's father. 



I am going to ask Dr. Morris if he will present his paper and 

 make his demonstration at this time, 



Dr, Robert T, Morris : I have had a good many experiences 

 in grafting for a number of years. I have finally discarded most 

 methods and have gotten down to rather simple principles. As a 

 matter of fact this is the last word from my own point of view. 

 During the past thirty or forty years I have changed my mind so 

 many times on so many subjects that I have no confidence at all in 

 anybody who puts any trust in me. 



I am getting down to the splice graft. The reason why I didn't 

 try it before was because it didn't seem reasonable to believe that 

 the simple splice would hold. It was because I was so busy with 

 many other responsibilities that on one occasion I neglected to brace 

 some large splice grafts. Thus I learned that the splice graft would 

 hold even through the very severe storms in our vicinity of Stam- 

 ford, Connecticut. We have violent thunder storms and sometimes 

 for a few minutes in advance of a storm we have a wind velocity of 

 sixty or seventy miles an hour. If at the time the leaves happen to 

 be wet the battering power of a seventy-mile wind is so tremendous 

 that it will break out almost any form of graft. But my splice 

 grafts during the past two years, simple splice grafts, subjected to 

 this sort of storm, have not given way on a single occasion so far as 

 I know, much to my surprise. 



I will pass about some examples of the simple splice graft first 

 and then show how we do it. 



