ner than grafting will.

5. We now produce a 3'-4' tree for a very reasonable figure.

6. All varietal forms at present are as yet unstabilized (most varieties
of 10 years ago have been discarded). There will probably be some duds
in seedling trees, but we've had no local complaints and I wonder if
they will exceed the "troubles" found in the grafted tree. We have had
customers brag about what their 2 or 3 or 6 trees bore.

To prove our faith in this method we planted a test orchard. When the
trees were 3 years old from 2 year transplants they bore 25 pounds. Next
year, 1944, they bore 800 pounds or an average of 1 pound per tree.
Right then and there we thought that we would have a real story to tell,
but we had misfortune in another direction. Three years in a row we have
had frosts when 6 inches of new growth were on these trees (the orchard
is not as well situated as the parent trees in this respect). So we had
no crops worth mentioning but neither did we have strawberries or
similar fruits. This year the orchard was frosted 2/3 the way to the top
so we will get quite a few nuts, maybe 500 pounds. Incidentally, we have
been here 25 years and we've not had frosts like these before.

We use all of our good nuts for seed purposes, grading out all small or
damaged nuts. In raising these trees, even from seed, we've had our
troubles. We let them cure several weeks then plant them in well fed
soil in a narrow trench about 2 inches deep. We place the nuts 5 or 6
inches apart; we fill the trench with sawdust level with the surface. We
mound the soil over this about 4 inches until spring. Then it is
removed. This method lets the shoots through, otherwise they tend to
send 3 or 4 stems. The nut sends down the root very early in the spring.
We have some trouble with the mole-mice combination; for this reason
heavy soil and sawdust is better than sandy soil. As you know neither
the nut nor the tree likes wet soil.

In raising the young tree the principal difficulty is in getting a
trunked upright tree. A seedling, especially when transplanted the first
year, flops all over like a flowering shrub. To get them up we plant
them fairly close, prune them, and feed them. Our 1 year trees are
usually two feet high and 2 year trees are 4 to 5 feet high. We
wholesale our trees mostly to mail order nurseries and the largest had a
5% request for replacements.

There are troubles in growing Chinese chestnuts just as there are in
most