A TREATISE ON NUT CULTURE. 103 



thought he was very wise in such matters, said that if I did such foolish things 

 as this I would be sold out at sheriff's sale before the Pecans came into bearing. 

 None of these things ever happened, and although the last years have been 

 very disastrous to cotton planters, our financial condition is better to-day than 

 when I planted the Pecan grove, and would be better still had I done more 

 of it. 



How the Grove Was Planted. 



And now the laugh, which nine years ago was very loud and strong, has 

 been turned, and, instead of a foolish thing, my friends see that it was a wise 

 thing I did. There was one neighbor, a good farmer withal, but a man with 

 the bad trait of thinking that all men who did differently from him were in the 

 wrong. This man lost no opportunity of poking fun at me nine years ago, when 

 I was planting my grove. Nine years have passed since then, and that makes 

 a great difference. I was passing by his house the other day, and I saw that he 

 had torn down his yard fence in order to cut down a fine oak tree that was 

 shading a Pecan tree his wife had planted years ago. I stopped to have a talk 

 with him. " I am one of the biggest fools that ever lived," he said. " When 

 my wife planted this one tree, I should have planted half my place in Pecans." 



I planted the nuts in the cotton rows thirty feet apart, and the rows sixty 

 feet apart. I marked each nut with three pieces of shingle. When the trees 

 were one year old I put a stout post by each tree, which was removed in six 

 years, as the trees were then large enough to take care of themselves. For the 

 first five years I planted the ground to cotton, then alternated it with corn and 

 peas. My trees now average about twenty- five feet high, and in a few more 

 years I shall have to sow the land with clover, and use it for pasture. The trees 

 on our rich land should stand sixty by sixty feet, so I will have to remove some 

 of mine, as they are too thick in the row. But I shall wait and see which bear 

 the finest nuts, and remove only the inferior ones. This will give a little 

 unevenness, but will cause me to save all the finer nut-bearers, which could not 

 be done if every other tree were removed. 



I have several trees in the yard at Cottage Oaks, just six years in advance 

 of my big grove, and from these I can make a fair comparison of what my 

 grove will do in six years. In the Fall of 1892 several of these trees bore as 

 much as a barrel apiece, so in five more years I can count on many of my trees 

 in the grove doing as much. From my experience with Pecans, I have found 

 out the following facts: Trees grown from fine nuts reproduce themselves, with 

 slight variations. The cutting of the tap root of a Pecan tree does not prevent 

 its bearing. It causes the tree to grow more slowly, and to produce a denser 

 head, with more fruit-bearing twigs, which will bear twice as many nuts. This 

 is in direct opposition to the statements of those men who have seed to sell, but 



