102 A TREATISE ON NUT CULTURE. 



PECAN GROWING IN LOUISIANA. 



BOI/TING A BIG NUT {5TORY. 



How The Laugh Was Turned on the Croakers. 

 By Samuel H. James, in Rural New Yorker. 



In my rambles around New Orleans, when a student at Tulane University, 

 in that city, I took close notice of the various products offered for sale, and the 

 prices charged for them. I soon saw that the most valuable of all the horticul- 

 tural and agricultural products the one that brought the most money for the 

 given weight was the large sized soft -shell Louisiana pecans. The best grade 

 of these sold at the unvarying price of |i a pound, and as years went on there 

 was no decline in the price. I had spent much of my boyhood upon a cotton 

 plantation, where pecans thrived, and I knew that a tree came into bearing at 

 nine years old, and would bear a profitable crop at fifteen years. One day I 

 did a little sensible reasoning on this subject. I was still a young man. If I 

 bought a large number of these nuts and planted a big grove, ten years after- 

 wards I would still be in the middle life, and have a valuable source of profit. 

 Every old man whom I had ever heard talk on this subject had expressed a 

 regret that he had not planted a Pecan grove in his youth. I determined that 

 this should not be my regret in old age. I resolved to save enough of my 

 yearly allowance to buy me a large amount of seed of these extra-size Pecans. 

 My mother owned a plantation in Louisiana, and after some persuasion she 

 agreed to give me enough land to plant my Pecan grove on. As this was rich 

 alluvial land, there was nothing now in my way to prevent my beginning my 

 work. I planted my grove nine years ago this winter, and last fall it came 

 into bearing. It was a happy day for me when I first saw the clusters of nuts 

 hanging on the trees. My grove now numbers about seventy acres, and this 

 winter I shall plant thirty acres more. 



How Old Timers Laughed. 



When I first started to plant my grove nine years ago, I became the laugh- 

 ing stock of the whole community. I was doing something no one had ever 

 done before, and it was past comprehension to our people how any one could 

 wait ten years to get paid for his work. Fun was poked at me at every turn 

 and corner, even by my best friends. I planted the nuts in the open field among 

 the cotton, and my friends would say, "Why! there is no possible hope of 

 your getting a Pecan grove. The little negroes will grabble up the nuts before 

 they come up, and even if they do germinate, the mules and plows and careless 

 negroes will destroy them all before they are a year old. ' ' One old uncle, who 



