he Central States, it would be an
advantage for all of us.

MR. STOKE: In my area the control of the pest is complicated by the
presence of the chinquapin.

PRESIDENT BEST: We have a surprise feature this afternoon. Dr. Graves of
the Connecticut Experiment station, who, as you know, is the father of a
lot of this work on chestnuts, has consented to discuss with us certain
new procedures that he used in grafting chestnuts.

DR. GRAVES: We have worked with this method of inarching blighted
chestnuts so long and found it so successful that I felt it my duty to
tell you people something about it. It's really a method of cure for the
blight on Oriental chestnuts and their hybrids. I have not found it to
work well on the American chestnut.

Now, suppose we have our tree, with a blighted area on the trunk. I am
assuming that the blight starts near the base of the tree as it usually
does.

When you see it, you cut it out with a sharp knife removing the bark to
the wood. Blighted trees send up shoots from the base, below the
blighted bark. So you take one of these shoots, sharpen it at the top
and insert this sharpened tip under the healthy bark at the top of the
blighted area. The shoot should be a little longer than the blighted
area so that you can get a spring to the shoot as you push its tip in
between the bark and the trunk. Even if it goes up above and breaks the
bark a little bit, it doesn't matter. This inarched shoot renews the
connection between the leaves and the roots across the blighted area.

You know the leaves make the food of the tree, which goes down in the
bark to the roots. The reason blight kills these trees is that it begins
to girdle and sometimes does girdle the tree and destroys the connection
between the leaves and the roots, so the roots eventually die. But by
this method of inarching you restore that connection between leaves and
roots.

Now, you'd be surprised to see how well that's worked with us. We tried
it first in 1937. We have been doing it now for 16 years. Every spring
we take our trees that show the blight, our hybrids and Oriental
chestnuts, and inarch, and the whole thing doesn't take more than a few
minutes. Then after our shoot is inarched here, we tie it with
old-fashioned string. The tips of the inarched grafts should be covered
with grafting wax or paraffin.

The scion will probably send out shoots which should be removed. And
another thing, cut the string when you know the