28 



THIRTY-FOURTH FRUIT-GROWERS^ CONVENTION. 



the sap, and there all of the inorganic food materials which can he 

 utilized for food in that tree will be transferred into organic material ; 

 whereas the poisonous product will be left more or less as a residue, ancl 

 if enough of it accumulates will ultimately prove injurious to the tree. 



There is, however, another method which I think will materially help 

 to bridge over this gap betw^een the going out of the seedling orchard 

 and the coming in of the grafted orchard, and that is the proposition 

 of proper fertilization, irrigation, and cultivation. There is no doubt 

 that in nearly all the old seedling orchards which we have to-day in 

 Southern California, if they w^ere properly, intelligently and carefully 

 fertilized, irrigated, and cultivated, the production could be materially 

 increased to the profit of the one who is the owner or the recipient of 

 that orchard. By a number of experiments which we have made in 

 cooperation with experiments which have been made by growers indi- 

 vidually, it has been conclusively demonstrated that the production of 

 an orchard can be very materially increased by the use of fertilizers 

 rich in nitrogen and phosphoric acid, by intelligent and careful cultiva- 

 tion the season through, so as to conserve moisture, and also by a late 

 fall and winter irrigation. Orchards which have had good dressings 

 of barnyard manure, followed by heavy applications of fertilizers rich 

 in both nitrogen and phosphoric acid, have within the last three or four 

 years, some of them, almost doubled the yield. The idea of irrigating 

 late in the fall is simply this, that in that way we can escape largely 

 the ravages, or, rather, we can escape some of the effects that usually 

 result in a seedling orchard from sudden changes in climatic conditions. 

 By keeping the trees growing as late as we possibly can in the fall, the 

 trees will come out later in the spring and escape that w^orst period of 

 infection which occurs in the spring about two weeks or so earlier than 

 at the present time. 



So, then, Mr. Neff has covered pretty well the proposition of grafting 

 over an old orchard by the selection of non-producing trees in an 

 orchard, and gradually working these over. If, at the same time, Ave 

 will supplement this top-grafting of the orchard by intelligent fertiliza- 

 tion, cultivation, and irrigation, we can keep up the production of 

 most of the orchards to what it is at the present day, and at the end of 

 five or six years have most of the orchards grafted over into varieties 

 that will not only be desirable from the standpoint of productiveness, 

 but also desirable from the standpoint of quality and every other char- 

 acteristic that you may require in a walnut. He has explained to you 

 pretty well the method which he has used down there at his place ; and 

 I want just briefly to mention another which we have used in our experi- 

 mental work this spring at the Whittier Station, and the work of course 

 being carried on at various places through the walnut-growing sections 

 of Southern California. The method which Mr. Neff used, as he told 

 you, was a variation of the cleft method. For the sake of variety, and of 

 trying out various methods, we used a modification of the whip-graft 

 method, which has been used very successfully by I\Ir. Weinshank of 

 Whittier, especially in nursery grafting. This year I looked over much 

 of the nursery grafting which he did this past spring. Only yesterday, 

 and by actual cojint, we found that the per cent which he has growing 

 at present varies from eighty-five to ninety. As a nursery graft I 

 think that is, perhaps, the best method which we have at the- present 



