6. All varietal forms at present are as yet unstabilized (most varieties of 10 years ago have been discarded). There will probably be some duds in seedling trees, but we've had no local complaints and I wonder if they will exceed the "troubles" found in the grafted tree. We have had customers brag about what their 2 or 3 or 6 trees bore. To prove our faith in this method we planted a test orchard. When the trees were 3 years old from 2 year transplants they bore 25 pounds. Next year, 1944, they bore 800 pounds or an average of 1 pound per tree. Right then and there we thought that we would have a real story to tell, but we had misfortune in another direction. Three years in a row we have had frosts when 6 inches of new growth were on these trees (the orchard is not as well situated as the parent trees in this respect). So we had no crops worth mentioning but neither did we have strawberries or similar fruits. This year the orchard was frosted 2/3 the way to the top so we will get quite a few nuts, maybe 500 pounds. Incidentally, we have been here 25 years and we've not had frosts like these before. We use all of our good nuts for seed purposes, grading out all small or damaged nuts. In raising these trees, even from seed, we've had our troubles. We let them cure several weeks then plant them in well fed soil in a narrow trench about 2 inches deep. We place the nuts 5 or 6 inches apart; we fill the trench with sawdust level with the surface. We mound the soil over this about 4 inches until spring. Then it is removed. This method lets the shoots through, otherwise they tend to send 3 or 4 stems. The nut sends down the root very early in the spring. We have some trouble with the mole-mice combination; for this reason heavy soil and sawdust is better than sandy soil. As you know neither the nut nor the tree likes wet soil. In raising the young tree the principal difficulty is in getting a trunked upright tree. A seedling, especially when transplanted the first year, flops all over like a flowering shrub. To get them up we plant them fairly close, prune them, and feed them. Our 1 year trees are usually two feet high and 2 year trees are 4 to 5 feet high. We wholesale our trees mostly to mail order nurseries and the largest had a 5% request for replacements. There are troubles in growing Chinese chestnuts just as there are in most fruits and nut crops and, in a way, I am glad there are because I am of the opinion there is no such thing as harvesting without cultivation. For instance, if you plant them and let nature take its course--it will. It will on an apple, too. We have found a few small lesions of chestnut blight which were removed by pruning and then painted with pine tar. They usually occurred at a previous point of pruning. Some of the transplanted seedlings have developed a twig canker at a bud, but I've never seen them kill one and even when we don't prune it out, the tree overcomes it by new growth.