The Chairman: Does the shell fill down there?
The Chairman: It grows very vigorously in Connecticut. It is a perfectly hardy hybrid, but I am afraid I shall only be able to use the crop for spectacle cases.
Mr. Reed: This shows one of the most common methods of propagating the pecan, the annular system. It is a slight modification of the system Mr. Rush applies to the propagation of the walnut. This shows one of the tools designed especially for annular budding, the Galbraith knife. The rest of the operation you already understand. It is merely placing the bud in position and wrapping the same as Mr. Rush does.
The Chairman: I would like to ask, does it make a great deal of difference whether the bud ring is half an inch long or an inch and a quarter long?
Mr. Rush: It does not make any difference. The union takes place on the cambium layer. It is not made on the cut.
The Chairman: Then the length of the bud is not of great importance?
Mr. Rush: No, it is of no importance at all.
Mr. Reed: This slide may be a little bit misleading. Two nuts matured in the nursery on a scion that was inserted in February. The scion was taken from a mature tree and the fruit buds had already set and had enough nourishment to carry them through the season so that they matured. That is no indication of what may be expected in the way of bearing. It is one of the freaks. This is merely a view of a fourteen-year old pecan orchard in south-western Georgia, a 700-acre orchard owned largely by one person. That is the orchard belonging to Mr. G. M. Bacon, a name probably familiar to some of you. Those trees are set 46 feet, 8 inches apart, each way. There are twenty trees to the acre, just beginning to bear now. That photograph was taken some two years ago showing the first step in topworking. The top has been removed, as you notice, and the next slide shows the subsequent water-sprouts which are later budded. The lower branches were left in the first place to take up the sap while the new head was in formation. They have now been removed. Our next point might be brought out in connection with this slide. One of the typical, sub-tropical storms, not unusual in the Gulf States, swept over this area in September, just as the nuts were beginning to mature and defoliated the trees and whipped off the nuts. The sap was still in circulation, and the varieties that respond most readily to warm weather, that start earliest in the spring, sent out new leaves, so that foliage was foliage that ought to have come on the next year, that is, it was exhausting next year's buds. The same year the tree sent out its blossom buds, so it had no fruit the following season. This slide shows one of the pests in the pecan orchard, the twig girdler, at work. The insect deposits its egg under the bark up at about that point, then goes down below girdles the twig, and it breaks off, goes to the ground, and the insect comes out, goes into the ground and comes out the next season. There are a good many drawbacks that are occurring and more are to be expected the same as with other fruit. There are probably no more setbacks to pecan growing than there are to the growing of other fruit, but this is one of the things. This orchard was set in land bordering the Flint River and at the time this picture was taken the water stood at the depth of three feet. It probably did no harm, because it didn't stay more than a week or ten days. Sometimes it stays longer and in such cases it is a serious matter. In Texas, floods come up like that into the branches of the trees, so high in some seasons after the nuts are formed, that the nuts deteriorate and fall to the ground. In such cases it is a pretty serious thing. (Applause.)