ommercial sort. Intent eyes
are watching every new seedling in search of new and superior varieties.
Some have been found and will be propagated. Nut growers are but warming
to the idea. I am putting out eight thousand four-year old seedling
filbert trees in orchard form to be tested for qualities desired in a
better filbert.

Tree filberts instead of bushes is a new idea that is fast gaining
headway against the old method of removing the suckers by hand each
season. _Corylus colurna_, the Turkish species, and _Corylus chinensis_,
the Chinese tree hazel, are most favored as stocks. It has been found
that these trees are easily grafted to filberts, that they are extremely
hardy and grow twice as fast as the filbert, and that the vigor of the
stock enlarges the size of the nut, regardless of variety. Foremost in
the recommendation of grafted tree filberts, I have correspondents in
many foreign countries and have arranged for the delivery of several
thousand pounds of these nuts to grow seedlings of.

The tree hazel is of the future as yet, and one must recognize the
demand for layered stock until replaced by what appears to be better. To
add at least thirty acres to my present filbert plantings this year is
my desire. I am planting at least 400 trees to the acre as interplants
in a grafted walnut orchard. No use in wasting time before the trees
begin to bear profitable crops. Three and four years at most for
man-sized returns when using a ten foot planting.

One planting of Du Chilly filberts last year produced an average of
close to 40 pounds per tree on nine-year-old trees and an average of 10
pounds on four-year-old trees. The spread of the latter trees was scarce
four feet, and I counted 22 nuts on a branch eight inches in length. Mr.
A. W. Ward reports an average crop of 200 nuts to each two-year-old
filbert tree in his four-acre planting this season. These are also Du
Chillys that are fast building up a sentiment favoring them before the
lower-priced Barcelona variety. The Barcelona is a more vigorous tree
and shells out of the husk 75% whereas the Du Chilly is but 40% self
husking, but that will not offset the differential of five to ten cents
per pound in favor of the great, oblong nuts.

The _walnut_ acreage of Washington and Oregon is approximately 12,000
acres and is now taking a new hold with all the additional planting
being made up of _grafted_ trees. The VROOMAN FRANQUETTE variety grafted
on the Califor