If any one wishes to contradict my statement about these trees living with such treatment, I will admit that I am not speaking from experience with regard to the pecan, but I believe the experience of others admirably verifies the statement I have made. I am, however, speaking literally from my own experience when I refer to the black walnut. For ten summers past I have in July and August scythed off a certain tract of stump land planted to apples. Each year black walnuts and butter nuts have been cut, and now at the end of that time the stubs are still annually throwing up vigorous shoots 2-1/2 to 4 feet in length, and if they are allowed to escape for a season, they dart past a man's head so fast he wonders what has happened.
While I hope to experiment for forty more years on my mountain side in the attempt to cover it with waving fruitful trees that are so immune to pests as not to need spraying, I shall never again be caught with only one possibility upon a given piece of land. If I should top-work my native hickories to shagbark, which I know involves considerable waiting and considerable uncertainty, I can, with very little expense, put upon the same ground a full stand of grafted black walnuts and a full stand of budded pecans, or if I do not care to go to that much trouble, I can graft my hickories and plant my native black walnuts and merely keep them there in submerged condition as reserve trees ready to be grafted at any time. For a pecan orchard I can do exactly the same thing, using black walnuts as fillers, possible successors, or as ungrafted reserves. For the Persian walnut, the black walnut can again come in as a filler or as a reserve, and for grafted blacks of any variety, other blacks can be kept waiting for the arrival of possible better varieties which could easily become the head of the corner.
My experience with transplanting seedling pecans shows that they, too, can, without serious difficulty, be planted out in such rough land and kept waiting there for years until the day of possible utilization.
Lastly, I wish to emphasize one more possible crop insurance tree for the man who is planting nuts on land difficult of cultivation, or entirely untillable, and that is the persimmon. I have paid my respects above to the tilled crops and the pastured pig for the arable land, and for the unarable land I would still emphasize the pig and give him other sources of food to supplement pasture. Among these possible foods is the persimmon which as yet has been little appreciated in an extensive way, although hundreds of thousands of men know it is highly prized forage and of considerable fattening value. It has a crop insurance virtue, however, other than its acceptability as pig feed. That is the hardiness of the tree and the ease of establishing it. In my pasture lot the Angora goat, even when pushed with hunger, has not touched persimmon wood or leaves. The same is practically true of the black walnut and of the butternut. This fact is one of great importance, because it means that we can keep rough land in pastures, even goat pasture, during the period when we are planting out tall-headed nut trees of almost any variety, and at the same time have a perfect stand of two kinds of crop insurance trees coming along, namely, walnuts and persimmons.