"This tree is 106 feet tall, with a spread of 110 feet, has two limbs, respectively 57 and 60 feet long and is 13 feet in circumference, 3 feet above ground, and is an annual bearer of thin shell, nuts that, though rather small now, are mighty good to eat."
If nut trees are going to grow into that size, we must plant very wide or make up our minds to a very heroic and very difficult act, one which many men in the South should do this minute, namely, cut down half or three-quarters of the nut trees on a given acre.
I wish to emphasize the health aspect from the standpoint of the tree of this very wide planting. It is generally recognized by horticultural authority that trees develop sickness and disease when crowded in large numbers. The pecan trees 100 feet apart may perhaps escape this danger and have the sun on all parts of their leaf surface, a fact, by the way, which is necessary to crop production on this and other nut trees.
This wide planting is practically the method followed in most of the important French Persian walnut districts. With very few exceptions their trees are isolated, a man having two or twenty, or thirty, scattered about his farm, usually in the midst of his fields where they can develop to perfection, take the tillage of the crops, and bring in some extra money, which one of the owners very significantly told me is "income without effort." This income without effort aspect of the matter takes the form of a man having to pay as much rent for a good walnut tree in the department of Dordogne, as he does for an acre of good wheat land alongside.
What kind of tree crops insurance might I have had for my chestnuts grafted nineteen years ago? Had I known then as much as I now know about nut trees, excepting the chestnut blight, I should have planted that place thickly with black walnut nuts and northern pecan nuts, unless the squirrels were too quick for me, in which case I should have used little seedlings. These I would have kept in a submerged but hopeful condition by occasionally cutting them down. This would keep them from crowding the chestnut trees, but would by no means have kept me out of a stand of vigorous pecans and black walnuts ready to graft at very short notice. When the blight blew its signal of national alarm in 1908, I could have gone to grafting those trees and they would by this time probably have been in bearing and ready to replace the chestnuts which are now dying with the blight.