14 



The Bulletin, 



ordinary nursery methods of propagating the apple and peach fail 

 almost entirely with pecans. Special and difficult methods of -budding 

 and grafting must be employed, and our best-known methods of 

 propagating pecan trees give, under favorable conditions, only about 

 50 per cent of living buds. Pecan bud-wood is also much more expen- 

 sive than that of standard varieties of fruit trees. There is a remarka- 

 ble variation in the growth of the little seedling trees in the nursery 

 rows. Some of the trees grow off all right, but often a very large per- 

 centage of them are "runts" and will not make good trees if given 

 the most favorable conditions for years. Fig. 5 illustrates a row of 



Fig. 5. — Pecan Seedlings in Nursery Row, Showing Great Variation in Vigor. 

 (Photo by H. H. Hume, Glen Saint Mary, Florida.) 



nursery stock showing the great variation in the seedlings. With 

 reputable nurserymen the small "runty" trees are destroyed, for they 

 are lacking in vigor and will never amount to anything. Fig. 6 

 shows one of such trees that is 16 years old and has not made 5 feet 

 of growth. This culling out of the seedlings which are lacking in 

 vigor is of course a considerable loss to the nurserymen and must 

 necessarily increase the price of the remaining trees. Unfortunately, 

 all nurserymen are not as scrupulous as they should be, and while 

 an honest propagator would put the stunted trees on the brush-pile, 

 another uses them to fill orders for smaller sizes of trees. The planter 



