Growing Nuts in the North - A Personal Story of the Author's Experience of 33 Years - with Nut Culture in Minnesota and Wisconsin by Carl Weschcke
page 22 of 145 (15%)
page 22 of 145 (15%)
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in getting a single graft to grow on it. Other younger trees, from three
to six inches in diameter, I successfully grafted. Some of these are still living but clearly show the incompatibility of the two species when black walnut is grafted on butternut. The opposite combination of butternut on black walnut is very successful and produces nuts earlier and in greater abundance than butternut does when grafted on its own species. The expense of buying trees by hundreds was so great that after a year I decided that I could very easily plant black walnuts to obtain the young trees needed as understocks. When they had grown large enough, I would graft them over myself. I wrote to my friend in St. Peter, Mr. E. E. Miller, and he told me where I could obtain walnuts by the bushel. Soon I was making trips to the countryside around St. Peter buying walnuts from the farmers there. I planted about five bushels of these at the River Falls farm and the rest, another two bushels, at St. Paul. Soon I had several thousand young walnut trees which all proved hardy to the winters. When pruning the black walnut trees purchased from Mr. Jones for transplanting, I saved the tops and grafted them to the young trees with a fair degree of success. In a few years, I was using my own trees to fill up spaces left vacant by the mortality of the Pennsylvania-grown trees. I did not neglect seeding to provide stocks of the Eastern black walnut also, which is almost a different species from the local black walnut, but these seedling trees proved to be tender toward our winters and only a few survived. After they had grown into large trees, these few were grafted to English walnuts. The difference between the Eastern black walnut and the local native black walnut is quite apparent when the two trees are examined side by side. Even the type of fruit is |
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