his pocket and ate them at unexpected 
times. His diary reports the planting 
of these nuts, and the trees he planted 
at Mount Vernon are still thriving. 
Beat George Washington 
It is now easy for you to beat George 
Washington in the Pecan business, be- 
cause you can plant better trees than 
he could plant. You can piant grafted 
trees. He only had seedlings, and if 
there is any gamble that is loaded 
against you it is planting seedling 
Pecan trees. I’ve seen a row of them 
in southern Illinois planted from the 
best seed they could find. None gave 
nuts like the original seed, no two 
were alike, and nearly all were virtu- 
ally worthless. 
You can beat George Washington 
easily because the tens of thousands 
cf wild trees of the Ohio Valley have 
been carefully searched, the best trees 
have been found and propagated, and 
you can now buy little trees with every 
expectation that they will yield nuts 
which you can crack in your hand,. 
which will yield their kernels in entire 
halves and have a quality that is not 
only the equal of any Pecans from the 
South, but better. 
Pecans of Highest Quality 
At a national Pecan show at Mobile, 
Alabama, with all the big Pecans of 
the South present, the first prize for 
quality went to a Pecan from the Ohio 
Valley, the place our varieties origi- 
nated. Why this high quality? It is a 
fact well known in horticultural science 
that many varieties of fruit and nuts 
often produce their best quality near 
the northern range of the species. The 
oranges of Florida and California are 
better than the oranges of Brazil or 
Cuba. 
The Range of the Pecan 
Where will the Pecan grow? It will 
grow much farther north than it can 
ripen its fruit. Seedlings from Texas 
thrive in the climate of Pennsylvania. 
There are a few healthy old seedling 
trees in Connecticut. A beautiful tree 
in a park at Hartford, Connecticut, had 
a girth of over 11 feet. It was appar- 
ently a southern seedling planted in 
1858. I hhave seen lusty Pecan trees in 
Ontario near Toronto, grown from 
Georgia seed in a place where they 
could not possibly ripen their fruit. 
The Pecan seems to require a large 
amount of summer heat to bring the 
nuts through to fruition. One measure 
of this heat is the total number of 
degrees of monthly average temperature 
Greenriver Pecan tree 24 years planted. 
in a farm truck patch. Good for 50 
pounds of nuts now and one or two 
hundred larger crops in the days to 
come. Note the man. This is the 
parent tree from which come all the 
Greenriver trees we sell. 
above 50° F. The accompanying table 
shows some of these facts. 
The varieties I sell have been per- 
fectly hardy as to winters, and have 
ripened their nuts at the nursery. After 
two cool summers in the last twelve 
years the kernels were not developed 
fully enough to be commercially mar- 
ketable, but they were of good flavor 
for home use. 
Now the record at Ithaca (—35° F. 
winter 1933-34) is that the Pecans that 
I sell are hardy trees and make beauti- 
ful shade but do not ripen their nuts. 
They do ripen at my nursery and 
nearly every year at Lewisburg, Pa., 
105 miles south of Ithaca and at a 
slightly lower elevation and with two 
weeks longer growing season. With 
this table, and the facts of your own 
local climate at hand, you can figure 
out the probabilities of your location 
better than I can. You will find Dr. 
Rehder’s map (page 7) very helpful, 
and the U. S. Weather Bureau has 
