I am not qualified with all of these experts to get up here and talk about nuts. They say an expert is a fellow that learns more and more about less and less until he knows practically everything about nothing at all; and that's kind of my shape, sir.
Now, seriously, I have had this hobby of trying to grow nuts for a number of years. I grafted a golf club on a croquet post, and I got some wonderful golf balls. Before the war I ordered some Chinese chestnuts. I got in touch with Sakata and Company in Yokahama, and they finally came in. I didn't have any experience, and about all I had was some imagination, and I planted them out in the fall of the year like I planted any other nuts. I went out in the spring and investigated. There wasn't a darn one come up. The rats had beat me to them and eaten them all up.
I was a persistent cuss and ordered some the next year, and I put them up in fruit jars and figured I would plant them in the spring, and when the spring came they all had the dry rot.
So I ordered them the third year, and I made sacks out of fly screen wire and put those nuts outside, and in the spring they came up and I had a lot of nice sprouts about this high and put them in a seed bed with a board all the way around. My father is blind in one eye, couldn't tell a chestnut from a weed, and he pulled up the weeds and he pulled all the chestnuts up except one.
The fourth year I had better success, and I raised that year 400-and-some-odd chestnut seedlings, and I did more or less the Johnny Appleseed stuff with those. I gave those away in the community. I am, among other things, a banker, and I figured those would be as good as calendars, and I have not been able to follow the history of them. However, there is one of them I think is exceptional. It's a self-pollinator and is bearing heavy crops, and I intend to follow that particular tree up.
A genius, he is no better than any of the rest of us. All a genius is is a fellow that's got good digestion so he can eat enough to work long hours and good eyesight so he don't get tired.
So I was reading in a magazine about the Crath English walnut. They sent the Reverend Mr. Crath over to Poland before the war, and I got four pounds of those nuts he collected, and planted them. And every spring a cold spell would come along and get them before I could cut any grafts off of them. And I planted a Nebraska pecan and got some grafts from it, and my wife said that tree never did have a chance because I kept cutting the prunes off so they couldn't grow. I got several to growing, and then they didn't fill out the nuts.