e procured from Dr.
J. H. Kellogg by writing him. They are the two most northern persimmon
trees which I have discovered so far. The fruit is good to the taste and
the trees have lived through terribly cold winters. I mention this as
many of you are fruit growers also and want to get persimmon stock in
order to graft the Japanese persimmon on. The female tree every second
year is loaded to the point of breakage and should do well for stock.
Speaking about procuring seeds from dealers, I can get here and there
for one cent as much as I have to pay the dealer a dollar for. For
instance, while passing through Phoebus, Va., I asked a lady what she
wanted for Juglans sieboldiana and she said 5 cents a quart or 35 cents
a peck. She only got 16 bushels from a 20 year-old tree! They were
bigger and better specimens than I got from Japan at about five nuts for
one dollar, postage extra.
Then I wrote to a gentleman who had a small tree of Juglans cordiformis
in Ontario and he said that he only had a bushel which he was expressing
to me and to send him a dollar! Think, and the Japs sent me three nuts
for one dollar!! A lady at Niagara Falls, Ontario, told me that she had
a little tree of J. sieboldiana so I asked her the price and she sent me
half a bushel and said to pay the express charges which were a quarter!
And it is the same way with these forest seed merchants, they send me
for dollars the seeds of pinus edulis and pinus Koriensis that it would
take a powerful microscope to discern, and I afterwards bought of a
fruit merchant in Milwaukee a big glassful for a nickel!
Roadside planting is a failure, for, besides rodents little and big,
there are all kinds of animals from sheep to horses to destroy them, so
that I have to plant all my trees at least four feet within my fence
line.
Juglans Mandshurica seed I find impossible to procure so far. There are
two magnificent trees in Toronto planted by an old man who is dead now.
These trees show no sign of ever having been winter killed and are 13
and 19 feet high but have not fruited yet. The leaves are very long and
the trees resemble the stag horn sumach, except that they are distinctly
Juglans in appearance; but the growth of the year's shoots is thick and
long like a coppice growth.
LETTER FROM W. C. REED, VINCENNES, INDIANA
The Indiana pecan tree bore a splendid crop of about 3-1/2 bushels. The
Busseron also had a good crop on all the old wood and some on the
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