Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report: at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948
Science
Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report: at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948
Northern Nut Growers Association -- Periodicals; Nut trees -- Periodicals; Nuts -- Periodicals
Now, this other thing is interesting. If you take the five-year average
from 1942 through 1946 inclusive, and convert that to 35 trees--this is
10 trees--but when you convert that to an average of 35 trees per acre
you get the equivalent of 92 bushels of oats per acre. Now, understand,
with this yield of pods we were cutting two and a half tons of hay from
the _Lespedeza sericea_ each year. So we were getting our hay crop and
our grain crop from the same source.
Now, to give you just briefly what the Calhoun variety did during those
years, in 1942 the Calhoun trees--the same age planted under the same
conditions on the same soil--averaged 26.4 pounds of pods per tree. In
1943 the Calhoun followed closely with the Millwood; on account of a
freeze they didn't produce anything. In 1944 they produced 32.4 pounds
of pods per tree. In 1945 they produced 63.8 pounds of pods per tree. In
1946 they produced 22 pounds of pods per tree, and in 1947 they produced
46 pounds of pods per tree.
Now, if you will take the average of those, contrast it with the average
for the Millwood, you will find that the Millwood tree over a period of
five years produced almost three times as many pods as the Calhoun. The
Calhoun variety has a little more carbohydrates, and it always averages
a little more sugar per pound than the Millwood, but the additional
yield of the Millwood variety makes it very worthwhile.
I have done quite a bit of work on the blooming habits or the fruiting
habits of the honeylocust over a number of years, and I find that there
is quite a variation there in the individual trees. Some trees are
typically males. They never bear anything, but they have staminate
catkins. Others are typically females, never bearing anything but the
pistillate flowers. Then we have an integration there of perfect trees.
I know of one tree in Blount County, Alabama that for nine years never
missed a crop. It had perfect flowers, or rather, both pistillate and
staminate flowers on the same tree. However, the flowers were borne on
separate catkins, the pistillate flowers, catkins, coming out on the
same node with the male and producing the pod. So you do have a large
variation in the fruiting habits, and we have found those variations on
Millwood selections and on Calhoun selections, even though they were
vegetatively propagated.
The reason why we can take a bud off a female Millwood and put it onto a
root stock and get a male tree I can't figure out, but they seem to act
that way in that respect. I have had a Millwood tree that never bore
anything but male flowers.[18] That is something for someone else to
figure out. I can't explain it.
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