y, Barcelona, Italian Red, White,
Red, and Purple Aveline and many other well known filberts. Photo by C.
Weschcke_]

Chapter 6

PECANS AND THEIR HYBRIDS

At the same time, October 1924, that I purchased Beaver hickory trees
from J. F. Jones, I also procured from him three specimens each of three
commercial varieties of pecan trees, the Posey, Indiana and Niblack, as
well as some hiccan trees, i.e., hybrids having pecan and hickory
parents. Only one tree survived, a Niblack pecan, which, after sixteen
years, was only about eighteen inches in height. Its annual growth was
very slight and it was killed back during the winter almost the full
amount of the year's growth. In the 17th year this tree was dead.

In September 1925, at a convention of the Northern Nut Growers'
Association in St. Louis, Missouri, I became acquainted with a man whose
experience in the nut-growing industry was wide and who knew a great
deal about the types of hickory and pecan trees in Iowa. He was S. W.
Snyder of Center Point, Iowa. (He later became president of the
Association.) In one of his letters to me the following summer, Mr.
Snyder mentioned that there were wild pecan trees growing near Des
Moines and Burlington. I decided I wanted to know more about them and at
my request, he collected ten pounds of the nuts for me. I found they
were the long type of pecan, small, but surprisingly thin-shelled and
having a kernel of very high quality.

I first planted these nuts in an open garden in St. Paul, but after a
year I moved them to my farm, where I set them out in nursery rows in an
open field. The soil there was a poor grade of clay, not really suited
to nut trees, but even so, most of the ones still remaining there have
made reasonably good growth. I used a commercial fertilizing compound
around about half of these seedlings which greatly increased their rate
of growth, although they became less hardy than the unfertilized ones.
After five years, I transplanted a number of them to better soil, in
orchard formation. Although I have only about fifty of the original
three hundred seedlings, having lost the others mainly during droughts,
these remaining ones have done very well. Some of these trees have been
bearing small crops of nuts during the years 1947 to date. The most
mature nuts of these were planted and to date I have 17 second
generation pure pecan trees to testify as to the ability of the northern
pecan to become acclimated