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Chapter 3

BLACK WALNUTS

I have spent more of my time cultivating black walnuts than any other kind of nut tree and given more of my ground area over to them. Yet it was with no great amount of enthusiasm that I started working with these trees. Obviously there could be nothing new or extraordinary resulting from my planting trees of this species either on my farm or at my St. Paul home, since there already were mature, bearing black walnut trees at both places. It was only with the idea that they would be an attractive addition to the native butternut groves that I decided to plant some black walnut seedlings.

This did not prove feasible as I first attempted it. I had engaged a Mr. Miller at St. Peter to procure wild black walnut trees for me since they grew near that town. He was to dig these trees with as much of the root system included as possible and ship them to my farm. But the winter season came before this had been accomplished and both Mr. Miller and I, deciding the idea was not as practical as we had hoped it would be, abandoned it. Later that same autumn I found that a nursery just outside of St. Paul had several rows of overgrown black walnut trees which they would sell me quite reasonably. I bought them and sent instructions to the tenant at my farm to dig twenty-eight large holes in which to plant them. Packed in straw and burlap, the trees weighed about 500 pounds, I found. This was much too heavy and cumbersome to pack in my old touring car, so I hunted around for some sort of vehicle I could attach to my car as a trailer. In an old blacksmith shop, I came upon an antiquated pair of buggy wheels. They looked as though they were ready to fall apart but I decided that with repairs and by cautious driving, they might last out the trip of thirty-five miles. So I paid the blacksmith his asking price—twenty-five cents. The spokes rattled and the steel tires were ready to roll off their wooden rims but the axles were strong. My father-in-law and I puttered and pounded, strengthened and tightened, until we felt our semi-trailer was in good-enough order. It might have been, too, if the roads in the country hadn't been rough and frozen so hard that they hammered on the solid, unresisting tires and spokes until, almost within sight of the farm, one wheel dismally collapsed. As the wheel broke, the trailer slid off the road into a ditch, so that it was necessary to send on to the farm for the plow horses to haul out the car, the trailer and the trees. The horses finished hauling the trees to that part of the farm where holes had been dug for them. I had told my tenant to dig large holes and large holes he had certainly dug! Most of them were big enough to bury one of the horses in. Such was my amateurish first endeavor.

It was not until December of that year, 1919, that the twenty-eight trees were finally planted. Although the ground was already somewhat frozen and the trees poorly planted as a result, most of them started to grow in the spring. They would probably be living now if I had not been too ambitious to convert them from seedlings into grafted varieties such as the Ohio, Thomas and Stabler, which I had learned of during a winter's study of available nut-culture lore. I obtained scionwood from J. F. Jones, part of which I put on these abused trees and the remainder of which I grafted on butternut trees. At that time, I must admit, I was much more interested in trying the actual work of grafting than I was in developing or even conceiving a methodical plan to be worked out over a period of years.

In order to facilitate my grafting work that spring, I pitched a tent in the woods and lived there for a week at a time, doing my own cooking and roughing it generally. Cows were being pastured in this part of the woods and they were very interested in my activities. If I were absent for a long time during the day, on my return I would find that noticeable damage had been done to my tent and food supplies by these curious cows. While preparing some scionwood inside the tent one day, I heard a cow approaching and picked up a heavy hickory club which I had for protection at night, intending to rush out and give the animal a proper lesson in minding its own business. The cow approached the tent from the side opposite the door and pushed solidly against the canvas with its nose and head. This so aggravated me that I jumped over to that part of the tent and gave the cow a hard whack over the nose with my hickory stick. It jumped away fast for such a big animal. This seemed to end all curiosity on the part of these cows and I was allowed to carry on my work in peace.

With beginner's luck, I succeeded with many of the butternut grafts, as well as with some of the grafts on the twenty-eight planted black walnuts. However, all of the grafted black walnut trees ultimately died with the exception of one grafted Stabler. This large tree was a monument of success for twenty years, bearing some nuts every year and maturing them, and in a good season, producing bushels of them. One other of these seedlings survived but as it would not accept any grafts, I finally let it live as nature intended.

In 1921, I began ordering grafted black walnut trees, as well as grafted hickory trees from J. F. Jones, who had the largest and best known of the nurseries handling northern nut trees. Some of these grafted trees were also planted at my home in St. Paul, using the two locations as checks against each other. The site in St. Paul eventually proved unsatisfactory because of the gravelly soil and because the trees were too crowded. The varieties of black walnuts I first experimented with were the Thomas, Ohio, Stabler and Ten Eyck, which were planted by hundreds year after year. If I had not worked on this large scale there would be no reason for me to write about it today as the mortality of these black walnuts was so high that probably none would have lived to induce in me the ambition necessary to support a plan involving lengthy, systematic experimentation. Some of these early trees survive today, however, and although few in number, they have shown me that the experiment was a worthy one since it laid the foundation for results which came later. In fact, I feel that both the time and money I spent during that initial era of learning were investments in which valuable dividends of knowledge and development are still being paid.

In grafting black walnuts on butternut trees, I very foolishly attempted to work over a tree more than a foot in diameter and I did not succeed in getting a single graft to grow on it. Other younger trees, from three to six inches in diameter, I successfully grafted. Some of these are still living but clearly show the incompatibility of the two species when black walnut is grafted on butternut. The opposite combination of butternut on black walnut is very successful and produces nuts earlier and in greater abundance than butternut does when grafted on its own species.

The expense of buying trees by hundreds was so great that after a year I decided that I could very easily plant black walnuts to obtain the young trees needed as understocks. When they had grown large enough, I would graft them over myself. I wrote to my friend in St. Peter, Mr. E. E. Miller, and he told me where I could obtain walnuts by the bushel. Soon I was making trips to the countryside around St. Peter buying walnuts from the farmers there. I planted about five bushels of these at the River Falls farm and the rest, another two bushels, at St. Paul. Soon I had several thousand young walnut trees which all proved hardy to the winters.

When pruning the black walnut trees purchased from Mr. Jones for transplanting, I saved the tops and grafted them to the young trees with a fair degree