But my heart's right there, and our association is doing heroic work, although but two years old; we get our committees together two or three times a year, compare notes and crack the whip for another run. Then when we get together in annual convention there is something doing. We cut out the frills and get at once to business. No welcomes by the mayor and response by Colonel Long Bow with a brass band, but rather like the women at the fish market: "Have yees any nice fish, Mrs. Maloney?" "Indade, I have, Mrs. Flanigan." "They stink." "You lie." And that is the way our fight usually starts, only not so vigorously, of course.
We have one committee that is all important and is doing fine work. The committee on seedling varieties is making a survey of the western states to find a variety or varieties best suited to the soil and climate of the different localities. This committee includes the best men available for that work; H. M. Williamson, secretary of our state board of horticulture, chairman; C. I. Lewis, chief of division of horticulture, Corvallis; Leon D. Batchelor, experiment station, Riverside, California; A. A. Quarnberg, grower and experimenter, Vancouver, Washington; E. W. Mathews, extensive planter, Portland, and Charles L. McNary, planter, Salem. Mr. McNary told me yesterday that he had made a survey of thirty-five very fine trees, on blank cards similar to the one enclosed. We expect to have the record of at least 200 trees by the time of our convention. Only those that approach the standard wanted are listed.
To give the product of the walnut crop of the state would only be a wild guess. The system and machinery that we have for finding out how much we raise is only in embryo. The estimates reach all the way from 100,000 to 500,000 pounds. There is a good crop this year and the output for the market is growing rapidly. We need education more than we do growers. But we are learning.
I want to give you some facts of things that I find. Yesterday at the orchard of Alex Lafollette, State Senator from Marion county, and peach king of the Willamette Valley, I found seven-year-old walnut trees planted in rows among his peach trees, walnut trees planted sixteen feet apart! He said that his trees were full of little walnuts in the spring, but they all dropped off, and he did not think they would do well there. He said there were no catkins on the little trees, which accounts for the failure of his crop. This he did not know. And he did not know that the trees would produce the catkins in a year or so and remedy the failures. In the famous Dundee orchards I picked up handfuls of little fibrous roots, photo of which I sent you, that had been torn up by the plow and harrow when cultivating the walnut trees. Bales of these roots could be gathered up from the ground under the trees. The owner said that it did the trees good to treat them that way. Another black walnut tree that I visited in a cultivated field of good deep, rich soil, I found walnut roots protruding from the plowed ground as far away as 108 feet from the tree. The tree was thirty or forty years old.