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
I see no particular reason why that crop cannot be increased ten, twenty
or a hundred fold by just a stimulation of interest in the black walnut.
I recall back just previous to World War I, or about that time, there
was a tremendous demand, as usual, for black walnut for gun stocks. I
happened to be free for a month or so at that time so I could give some
attention to the purchasing and delivery of both veneer stock and walnut
for gun stocks. It was quite interesting to me as I went over a couple
of counties in which I made some purchases, to see that someone in the
40, 50 or 60 years back had had a vision of what the walnut tree would
be worth to them on their tracts of land and how we were at that time
reaping the harvest of the person who had a vision of the value of the
walnut tree. A great many of those trees were trees that had been set or
walnuts that had been planted years before by some far-seeing person,
and it had gone on without any interruption, probably without the
slightest bit of protection, until the time that it was needed and
desperately needed for economic purposes.
We have some work going on also in connection with the planting of
walnuts in pasture fields. The returns _from the pasture_ in the
planting of walnut trees have been just practically the same, maybe a
little bit better in favor of the walnuts than where we did not have
walnuts in the pasture. This work is being conducted down at the Middle
Tennessee Agricultural Experiment Station of the University of Tennessee
at Columbia. We are using the walnut tree and also the black locust in
this experiment. We don't know what the future of it is going to be, but
those walnut trees have grown large enough so that they have had to be
thinned to keep them from putting too much shade over the ground.
I made a statement several years ago in the presence of quite a
distinguished agronomist or horticulturist that I had never seen a
walnut tree growing in the open, whether it was in the blue grass region
or outside of a blue grass region that did not have blue grass growing
under it. He looked at me askance, and I said, "Do you believe it?"
"Well, I don't know," he answered.
So we happened to be coming out of Quincy, Florida, up through southern
Georgia outside of the blue grass region, and we were both sitting in
the back seat of the car. Our driver drove up to a filling station, and
I saw this fellow looked up at a walnut tree over in the yard not very
far away, in fact, the next yard to the filling station. I somehow or
other sensed what he was thinking. He pushed his door open, got out. I
pushed my door open, went around the car and followed him. He walked up
to that walnut tree, turned around and said, "Well, it's there." He
turned around and walked back.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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