NUT GROWING, A NEW AMERICAN INDUSTRY 



101 



their bread of chestnut flour. 

 In Corsica they feed chestnuts 

 to the horses. In Portugal 

 the pigs are entirely fattened 

 on acorns. Farms are valued 

 according to the number of 

 acorn oaks, chestnuts or wal- 

 nuts. The chief income of 

 many farmers is from walnuts 

 or chestnuts, filberts or al- 

 monds, millions of dollars 

 worth of which are exported 

 to us, when we ought to be 

 growing them ourselves. 



IMPORTS OF NUTS 



Our annual imports are 

 $15,000,000 in nuts and nut 

 products, in normal times, 

 with an average yearly increase 

 of about a million dollars. 



NUT GROWING IN AMERICA 



And yet this country is just 

 as good as anybody's country 

 for growing nuts. We have 

 such a diversity of climate 

 that we can grow most of the 

 world's varieties here in Amer- 

 ica, though it will take us many 

 years to develop over the 



whole country the permanent 

 system of agriculture, furnished by nuts and other tree 

 crops, which has been built up through centuries in many 

 older countries. 



In some parts of this country, however, a splendid be- 

 ginning has already been made. The walnuts and al- 

 monds of California bring even higher prices than the 

 imported but do not nearly fill our needs. The new pecan 

 grown in our southern states is a wonderful thing. Most 

 people's idea of a "pea can" is a little red nut that lurks 

 in the bottom of the Christmas bowl when all the good 

 nuts have been picked out ; a nuisance of a nut that 

 cracks all to pieces and has to be eaten with a hairpin. 

 These are the common wild Texas pecans worth four or 

 five cents a pound that the dealer mixes in to increase 

 the profits of the mixture that he sells for twenty-five 

 cents a pound. 



But there is no better nut in the world than the kind of 

 pecan to which thousands of acres are now being planted 

 in the South and which most people in the North have 

 never even seen. 



ORIGIN OF NUT VARIETIES 



And how were these splendid nuts obtained? Not by 

 some plant wizard mysteriously evolving them by scien- 

 tific processes, but simply by putting grafts from the best 

 nut trees of the fields and forests into young trees in the 

 nursery. This does not change the nuts at all. It simply 

 perpetuates them as Nature created them. Each grafted 

 nursery tree bears the same nut that the parent tree bore. 



A TYPICAL ENGLISH WALNUT ORCHARD 



This is the Vrooman Franquetta orchard, in Southern California. Great care^ and skilled attention is 

 given such large orchards as these, and there are many of them in Southern California. They produce 

 a very substantial annual profit for the owner. 



Many people do not know that the only way we can 

 grow any particular kind of fruit that we want is to graft 

 buds from the original tree on other trees of similar kind 

 in the orchard or nursery. All fruit trees that grow from 

 seeds are new kinds. You can't grow a true Baldwin 

 or Greening apple from seed. You must take the buds 

 from a Baldwin or Greening tree and bud or graft them 

 on another apple tree in orchard or nursery in order to 

 get trees that will bear Baldwin or Greening apples. It 

 is the same way with nut trees. You've got to bud or 

 graft them to get the same nut that grows on the parent 

 tree. 



A man planted a thousand nuts from one genius pecan 

 tree. Of the resulting trees no two bore nuts alike nor 

 like those of the parent tree and none as good. This is 

 because Nature isn't interested in growing things as man 

 wants them. What she is after is seed and plenty of it. 

 All trees grown from seed tend to revert to the common 

 type that Nature has found most useful for her seed pur- 

 poses. A genius tree, like a genius man, is a rare acci- 

 dent, and the children of geniuses are rarely geniuses. 



We can't graft a human genius. If we could we might 

 now have whole cities of Shakespeares, just as we have 

 whole orchards of Baldwin apples. But we can graft 

 genius trees and keep the characteristics practically un- 

 changed, perhaps for centuries. So if you know of a 

 genius nut tree it is your privilege and duty to have it 

 perpetuated by grafting. 



In the Old World, in California and in the pecan coun- 



