1906 



FORESTRY AND IRRIGATION 



101 



minimum. Moreover, it has been suc- 

 cessfully demonstrated that imported 

 and fancy varieties can be grafted onto 

 native hardy stock, to produce fine 

 nuts in great profusion. The different 

 kinds of hickory and walnut need 

 lower lands, but even these trees can 

 be successfully grown in bottom lands 

 whose frequent overflow renders them 

 unfit for farming purposes. While 

 these varieties are growing they are 

 not only producing a valuable timber 

 stand for the future, but in the present 

 they incidentally furnish a valuable 

 by-product in the nuts grown, making 

 such plantations valuable properties 

 long years before they mature for 

 lumber. By this plan annual harvests 

 wil pay the expenses of forest opera- 

 tions, and the man who plants these 

 hardwood trees has a reward in addi- 

 tion to the feeling that his children 

 will have a valuable inheritance in the 

 timber. 



Mr. E. A Sterling, of the U. S. For- 

 est Service, in a report furnished to the 

 New York Forest, Fish, and Game 

 Commission, recommends highly the 

 cultivation of chestnut groves, basing 

 his recommendation on actual obser- 

 vations of groves in New Jersey and 

 Pennsylvania. In these two states 

 chestnut culture has been tried in two 

 ways ; in groves of actual forest 

 growth under forest conditions, and 

 in orchards under orchard conditions. 

 The former method is a complete suc- 

 cess, and in its utilization of waste 

 land takes nothing from areas which 

 otherwise might be profitably devoted 

 to the cultivation of other crops. In 

 the latter method the chances of fail- 

 ure seem to be greater, and in case of 

 a failure there is not onlv the loss of 



the crop itself, but the loss of the use 

 of the ground on which the attempted 

 crop was grown. The most successful 

 method in use was the grafting of 

 Japanese, European, or desirable na- 

 tive varieties on the coppice growth on 

 cut-over chestnut lands, thus insuring, 

 in the second growth a maximum an- 

 nual crop value in a minimum time. 



It has been found that the Paragon 

 is the best variety for grafting, and 

 these will be in bearing in four years, 

 with an annual increase in the value 

 of the harvested crop. There is no 

 trouble in disposing of the yield, as 

 the demand is far in excess of the sup- 

 ply. The best Paragon nuts sell read- 

 ily at prices averaging 10 per hundred- 

 weight, and a usual price is $7 per 

 bushel. While the trees do not pro- 

 duce phenomenal yields in their early 

 years, especially if many of the burrs 

 are removed in order to get improved 

 quality and size of nuts in the remain- 

 ing ones, still the yield of older trees 

 is enormous, single trees giving $40 

 worth of chestnuts. 



It is probable that the success at- 

 tained by the Pennsylvania groves will 

 tempt others to make use of worthless 

 old hillsides to produce a crop of nuts 

 as well as timber, and under such con- 

 ditions the work forms a branch of 

 forestry rather than horticulture, since 

 the essential elements of the forest are 

 all there. More than that, chestnut 

 culture should go a long way in solv- 

 ing the problem of reclaiming worth- 

 less burned and waste land, which at 

 the present time is a standing menace 

 to surrounding forests. In addition to 

 this it provides for a more complete 

 utilization of forest areas. 



