This is a view in one of these hillside plantations of southeastern Spain with two of the almond growers.
This is a view in the plains region near Valencia showing both the hard shelled almonds and the soft shelled ones. The soft shelled are those which are easily cracked with the fingers while the hard shelled have to be broken with a hammer or an instrument. It is these hard shelled almonds that we have been interested in getting.
I have not kept in touch with this almond situation as I would have if I had been a specialist on almonds instead of spreading my energies out over the whole field and it is time someone really got into the almond business. I once traveled fifty miles from Bobadilla, Spain to the next railway station between solid walls of seedling almonds in bloom. No American has ever been to these seedling orchards to see what they are. It should be possible to find in those rows that are now 25 years old late flowering varieties which would be adapted to the conditions in California or early flowering varieties which would cross pollinate the Jordan almond. But we have not had the extra man with which to do this and carry out the other things we have been obliged to do. The interesting thing about this Jordan almond is that it behaves differently in our country than it does over in Spain. You notice how smooth each one of these almonds is. There is no sharp keel on the Spanish grown Jordan almond at all. It is smooth all around. Here are the almonds grown in California from the scions which I brought in. You see how these "keels" are developed and the nut has also become more pointed. We have not had an opportunity to investigate this thing thoroughly, but I am convinced that this is an environmental effect. Dr. W. A. Taylor has suggested that the fact that the Jordan flowers before any other variety comes out may mean that the California nuts are the result of self fertilization and this self fertilization may be the cause of their different shape and texture. Either that or the bud wood which I brought over from Spain was not representative of the Jordan variety although I picked it from trees that were bearing these nuts and I saw the nuts and they were typical. Of course it is possible that on the bud stocks which I brought over there was this hereditary tendency to produce these keels. However, we have made importations of the Jordan almond since then with the same result. One of these was grown in California in the desert region and one in Niles where John Rock, the great pioneer horticulturist of California, had his orchards. Both of them behaved in the same way. I sent some of the best kernels from these imported Jordan almonds to Mr. Lowney, the candy manufacturer who imports large quantities of Jordan almonds from Spain, and he reported that he could not use them for his candy manufacture because they were too hard and the skin too tough.