The Bulletin. 31 



NON BEARING OF SEEDLING TREES. 



It is a common complaint with seedling pecan trees that they are 

 provokingly tardy in coming into bearing. One may wait twelve, 

 fifteen or twenty years, annually encouraged by ever-increasing 

 foliage, only to find in the end that the trees give a meagre pittance 

 of nuts, that are of poor or indifferent quality. Experience has 

 shown also that in planting a number of seedling trees there will 

 be a proportion of them that will be barren. After waiting for years 

 for a crop, with hope annually deferred, the grower becomes sick 

 of the whole business and concludes that there is nothing in pecan 

 culture anyway. 



Last year I was asked to visit a pecan grove to advise the owner 

 as to ways and means for making his trees fruitful. I found a grove 

 of beautiful, large seedling trees of fourteen years growth, every 

 tree of which was in fine, healthy condition, but not a single one of 

 them had produced anything. The owner was discouraged with them, 

 because they had given not a cent's revenue for fourteen years' 

 tenure of his best soil, and he had decided to cut them down. I could 

 offer him little hope of an immediate crop, because the pecan is a 

 very long-lived tree, and a decade or two is neither here nor there 

 with a multicentenarian. Even should there be a heavy crop on 

 the grove in a year or two, there would still be some trees which 

 would probably never bear. There was every reason to believe also 

 that the nuts of the trees which did bear would be small and have a 

 wide variation in size, color and contents. The difficulty in predicting 

 any probability of profit from these large, healthy trees lay in the 

 fact that they were seedlings and therefore had behind them no 

 known ancestry for early or heavy bearing, and the owner might 

 possibly wait another decade without getting any additional data 

 on the subject. My advice to the owner was not to cut the trees off 

 at the root, but to cut off all the branches and work the stubs and 

 the resulting sprouts with scions of varieties having known char- 

 acteristics for early and heavy bearing. 



The characteristics of early and heavy bearing, or the lack of 

 them, are just as much individual possessions with a pecan tree 

 as the shape of its leaves or the size and color of its fruit. The 

 pecan tree is one of Dame Nature's hardy children that has had 

 to maintain its own identity in competition with her other wild 

 children. With no aid but its stalwart trunk and tough, woody 

 sinews, it has had to brave fierce storms, endure extremes of flood 

 and drought and fight its upward way to light and air, amid a tangle 

 of wild, struggling vegetation. Under such conditions nature's hardy 

 children are very conservative of their reserve forces, and give up 

 very grudgingly the moiety not needed for the ever-present battle for 

 food and air. Except under especially favorable conditions, wild 



