A TREATISE ON NUT CULTURE. 7* 



Chestnut Orchard, and grafted (cleft-grafting) or budded (ring-budding) at the 

 top, five or six feet from the ground, when large enough to undergo the opera- 

 tion. Pruning the Chestnut is useless and even hurtful, the only pruning 

 necessary being the cutting off of dead wood, or limbs in each other's way, or 

 to give the top a nice shape, but the very top of the free should be left alone. 

 Fruiting wood forms itself naturally, no trouble about it, and is not helped 

 out by pruning, as is the case with fruit trees, and besides, it lives a long time. 

 When the trees are getting very old pruning is beneficial, for, by cutting back 

 limbs worn out with age, it compels the tree to grow a new top. Here, under 

 the hot sun of California, I find that it is better to train the tree rather low. 

 This is the way I do it : First, I let the tree branch out at five or six feet, 

 letting the lower limbs spread out to their full length and Chestnuts have a 

 great tendency to spread and especially on the sun's side then I support with 

 poles those lower limbs, never trimming them off, and making it high enough 

 for any man to stand up under the tree; for it is those very limbs that bear 

 the most of the nuts and the largest and finest ones; if those limbs were not 

 propped up they would bend down to the ground under the weight of the 

 heavy burrs, as such is the case with Marron Chestnuts. 



HARVESTING AND PREPARATION OF CHESTNUTS. The Chestnut at this 

 altitude ripens its nuts from the middle of October to the first of November, 

 the prickly burr cracking open at the head, showing the brown shell of the 

 nuts inside, which drop to the ground when the burr is fully open or tne wind 

 shakes them down. However, to accelerate the harvesting of the nuts, and 

 when the burrs have taken a dark yellow color which tells that the nuts inside 

 are ripe, the burrs and nuts are knocked off the limbs by striking on the latter 

 with long, flexible and slender poles. A little wooden mallet is generally used 

 to open the burrs falling to the ground and which do not burst open naturally. 

 Boys stealing nuts simply use their two feet in squeezing out the nuts from 

 their prickly envelopes. The nuts are then placed in a shed to sweat that is, 

 to throw out their vegetation water and shipped immediately to market, if to 

 be used fresh. 



In the island of Corsica, where Chestnut trees comprise one-third of the 

 wooded part of the island, they first cut down in August the grass, ferns and 

 briars that cover the ground under the great Chestnut trees, so as to permit the 

 harvesting of the nuts with more ease. The harvesting of Chestnuts in that 

 island lasts twenty-five days and is done by women, who are boarded, and at 

 the end of the harvesting are paid, not in money but in " bleached Chestnuts," 

 that is, twenty-five gallons of bleached Chestnuts for twenty-five days of labor. 

 Bleached Chestnuts are Chestnuts dried hard and cleared of both hull and 

 pelicle; in short, ready to be ground for the manufacturing of meal or flour, 

 extensively used in all Chestnut-growing countries. Three gallons of fresh 



