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