at least ten years of growing before a
seedling butternut tree will bear any nuts. Of course, exceptions will
occasionally occur.

As a butternut tree matures, it spreads out much like an apple or
chestnut tree. Of course, it must have enough room to do so, an
important factor in raising any nut tree. Enough room and sunlight
hasten bearing-age and insure larger crops of finer nuts. Grafting
valuable varieties of butternut on black walnut stock will also hasten
bearing. I have had such grafts produce nuts the same year the grafting
was done and these trees continued to grow rapidly and produce annually.
However, they were not easy to graft, the stubborn reluctance of the
butternut top to accept transplantation to a foreign stock being well
known. This factor will probably always cause grafted butternut trees to
be higher in price than black walnut or hickory. The reverse graft,
i.e., black walnut on butternut should never be practiced for although
successful, the black walnut overgrows the stock and results in an
unproductive tree. Specimens 25 or more years old prove this to be a
fact.

Butternut trees are good feeders. They respond well to cultivation and
lend themselves to being grafted upon, although, from my own experience,
I question their usefulness as a root stock. I have found that when I
grafted black walnuts, English walnuts or heartnuts on butternut stock,
the top or grafted part of the tree became barren except for an
occasional handful of nuts, even on very large trees. Since this has
occurred throughout the many years of my nut culture work, I think it
should be given serious consideration before butternut is used as a root
stock for other species of nut trees.

[Illustration: _Weschcke Butternut. Smooth shallow convolutions of shell
allow kernels to drop out freely. Drawing by Wm. Kuehn._]

I had the good luck to discover an easy-cracking variety of butternut in
River Falls, Wisconsin, in 1934, which I have propagated commercially
and which carries my name. A medium-sized nut, it has the requisite
properties for giving it a varietal name, for it cracks mostly along the
sutural lines and its internal structure is so shallow that the kernel
will fall out if a half-shell is turned upside down. I received one of
those surprises which sometimes occur when a tree is asexually
propagated when I grafted scions from this butternut on black walnut
stock. The resulting nuts were larger than those on the parent