Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting: Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952
Science
Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting: Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952
Northern Nut Growers Association -- Periodicals; Nut trees -- Periodicals; Nuts -- Periodicals
MR. CALDWELL: This is just an observation I am throwing out for the
benefit of those who are here. I spent some time in China, and I was
interested in the fact that their walnuts there produced yearly crops.
In trying to find out why they produced yearly crops, I also discovered
that their persimmons, their plums and their peaches did the same thing.
The reason for that apparently goes back to their mythology. They
believe in signs and doing certain things according to certain seasons
of the year, and one of the things that they did was to gather together
in the dark of the moon on one particular night at a certain time and
beat the living daylights out of these trees with big bamboo clubs. I
wouldn't suggest that people here do that, but it's been known to
foresters quite a while that by transplanting or severely pruning or
girdling trees that you could produce fruits on these trees the
following year. Apparently the Chinese so injured the cambium during the
severe beating that they have caused that wound stimulus to induce the
formation of flower buds for the following year. By so doing in their
English or Persian walnuts they did have yearly crops. I have seen this
myself, and I checked back to see why. Perhaps they could explain it.
The only explanation we made was not fertilizing, but in the wounding of
the cambium. Now, perhaps there could be something done of that nature
for walnuts, but I wouldn't suggest getting around and beating the trees
up.
MR. MAGILL: In that connection, one man in Kentucky got the same answer.
He said about five years ago a cyclone came through there and blew the
chimney off the house and uprooted a number of apple trees and leaned
over three walnut trees, and he said they have borne five crops in
succession. Now, this is the same story that you have got there.
MR. STOKE: I'd just like to remark that I think that's a sort of
negative approach. I noticed a boy who had an apple tree that was about
to die. He girdled it and got a tremendous crop of blossom. You probably
have secured the same results. That is one of Nature's ways to
perpetuate itself. But I think there a constructive angle in those trees
that respond to nitrogenous fertilizer or manure. I believe the secret,
if there is a secret, is that a tree in bearing a crop exhausts itself
more or less. It recuperates the following year and then is ready to
bear another crop. And the way to meet that situation is to fertilize
heavily, especially with nitrogen, the season of the heavy crop so that
you will have not only enough leaf growth to produce that crop, but to
build up nutrients the following year. I believe that will help break
the cycle and establish more regularity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting: Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 — John Shaqi
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