THE NATIONAL NURSERYMAN 
95 
NUT PROMOTIONS 
By DR. W. C. DEMING 
From the Report of the Northern Nut Growers’ Association, 
of which the Author is Secretary 
Promoters attack their quarry with a two-edged sword; 
one edge is what they say, the other what they leave unsaid, 
and both edges are often run. 
What they say generally has a foundation of truth with a 
superstructure of gilded staff. You must knock over the 
staff and examine the foundations to see if they are laid up in 
good cement mortar or only mud. Sometimes they are 
honestly laid, but your true promoter can no more help 
putting on his Coney Island palace of dreams than a yellow 
journal reporter can help making a good story of the most 
everyday assignment. I suppose he takes a professional 
pride in it, even when the facts themselves are good enough. 
So you never can say that because of the evident gilding there 
is nothing worth while beneath. 
What the promoter does not say it is absolutely necessary 
for the safe investor to find out. Deductions from experience 
in general and from knowledge of the business in particular 
will help, and when these favor further investigation, there 
are two essentials for a wise decision. First, a study of the 
records of the promoters, and, second, a personal examination 
of the property. If these can be thoroughly made and the 
results are satisfactory after a suitable period of mental incu¬ 
bation, if the prospects will stand the candle test for fertility, 
you may put some money on the chance of a good hatch; 
remembering, too, that many a good hatch afterward comes 
to grief with the pip. 
Some promotions are conceived in iniquity, some in 
drunkenness and folly, and some are abortive from incapacity. 
Your legitimate and well-bom, well-brought-up promotion, 
fathered by ability and mothered by honesty, it is your 
problem to recognize, if that is what you are looking for, and 
to avoid the low-born trickster or incapable. No one can 
tell you how to do this any better than they can tell you an 
easy way to graft hickories. 
The northern nut grower is not yet bothered with northern 
nut promotions. At most he is called on to discount the 
statements of sellers, of trees, and that a little, not too expen¬ 
sive, experience will teach him. The West is apparently too 
busy selling fruit and fruit lands to lay out nuts to trap east¬ 
ern nibblers. But the allurements of pecan growing in the 
South are spread before us mth our bread and butter and 
morning coffee. The orange and pomelo properties have 
been banished from the stage, or made to play second fiddle, 
and now we see in the lime light the pecan plantation with a 
vista of provision for old age and insurance for our children. 
And there shall be no work nor care nor trouble about it at all. 
Only something down and about ten dollars a month for 
ninety-six months. And the intercropping is to more than 
pay for that. It is indeed an enticing presentation. 
Although we have as yet no northern nut promotions, we 
may expect the time when the sandy barrens of the shore and 
the boulder pastures of the rock-ribbed hills will be cut up 
into five-acre plots and promoted as the natural home of the 
chestnut and the hickory, holding potential fortunes for their 
developers. I hope it will be so, for it will postulate a 
foundation in fact. But the chestnut blight and the un¬ 
responsiveness of the hickory to propagation as yet hold up 
these future camp followers of the northern nut growing 
pioneers. So that for the present there is only the sword of 
the southern pecan promoter to parry. It would be a work 
of supererogation and effrontery for me to attempt to treat 
this subject in particular, since it has been so clearly and ably 
done by Mr. Van Duzee of St. Paul, Minnesota, and Viking, 
Florida, from the standpoint of long experience and full 
knowledge. His paper should be read by all interested 
persons. 
I may be permitted to make the following quotations 
from it: 
“The pecan as an orchard tree has recently been discovered 
and its history has not been written. The record at present 
is largely based upon scattered individual trees growing under 
abnormal conditions which, as a rule, are favorable. 
“Calculations and deductions based upon these results 
have been made which are fascinating, but they are utterly 
unreliable when applied to orchards of other trees in 
different localities growing under totally different condi¬ 
tions. 
“No one knows what a pecan orchard grown under such 
conditions is going to do.’’ 
Mr. Van Duzee expresses, however, the greatest belief in 
the success of pecan growing under proper personal super¬ 
vision. 
It all comes down to the question, “Can you or I hire our 
business done for us, never go near it ourselves and expect 
others to make a success of it for us?’’ 
And yet when all is said, I confess that I myself have been 
sorely tempted by my faith in the present and future of pecan 
growing in the South. I might have invested, were it not for 
my fimi belief that in nut growing the North is but a few 
years behind the South, and that I wish to devote my re¬ 
sources and my energies to having a hand in a development 
which, I share with you the belief, is to be of inestimable 
benefit to the human race. We can picture the day when our 
dooryards, our roadsides, our fields and hills shall be shaded 
by grand old nut trees, showering sustenance and wealth on 
our descendants and all people, and bearing the names of 
their originators; when the housewife of the future shall send 
her wireless call to the grocer for a kilo of Hales hickory nuts, 
the Rush, the Jones, the Pomeroy Persian walnuts, the Black 
Ben Deming butternut, the Craig Corean chestnut, the 
Morris Hybrid hickory, the Papershell Close walnut, or the 
Littlepage pecan. 
