Nut Grower's Handbook - A Practical Guide To The Successful Propagation, Planting, Cultivation, Harvesting And Marketing Of Nuts

By Carroll D. Bush

“The Nut Growers Handbook” is a fantastic, comprehensive guide to all things nuts, with a focus on growing them. It offers the reader simple, step-by-step instructions for the propagation, planting, cultivation, and harvesting of nuts; as well as information on their flavours, preparation and cooking, natural habitats, properties and characteristics, and much more. Contents include: “Nut Growing and its Place in American Agriculture”, “The Chestnut”, “Filberts and Other Hazels”, “The English Walnut”, “The Black and Other Walnuts”, “The Pecan and Other Hickories”, “The Almond”, “Pistachios, Pine Nuts, Acorns and Chinquapins”, “Pollination of Nut Groves”, “Planning, Planting, and Pruning”, etc. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in a modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new introduction on homesteading.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Nov 2, 2011
• ISBN: 9781447493624

Book preview

Handbook

I

NUT GROWING AND ITS PLACE IN

AMERICAN AGRICULTURE

Nuts have a strong appeal to every person. Perhaps it is because of childhood associations, or it may be that remembrance of holidays gives a certain glamor to them. It may be because they are such a natural food, so nutritious and so delicately flavored that every one eats them with relish and few ever tire of them.

There is also an appeal to their growing, a fascination in the nut groves of our far western states that we do not find in grain or even in fruit growing. Hardly a person who sees a fine grove without wishing to possess one like it. These people are not moved by thoughts of profit, either, but because of the trees’ magnificent beauty.

One who is interested in planting nut trees may be moved by some unacknowledged sentiment. Successful men often feel this way in respect to their business. The prospective grower, however, may be planning for an income with little expense or labor. In which he may be mistaken. He may be looking for a reasonably safe investment, which he will find if all conditions are right. He may be at a distance from markets so may wish a crop of small bulk and high value. He may be a fruit grower who has run into trouble with bad weather in harvest, or loss of market through some cause. He may wish to grow timber, so looks upon the nuts as a by-product.

Whatever the reason, nut growing should never be considered a bonanza. We have seen men grow to be fairly wealthy, from an agricultural standpoint, in nut growing. Many others have lost money. It takes study and labor and most of all, patience and persistence. Like any good farmer, a good nut grower must have a considerable amount of scientist in his makeup.

Nut growing is NOT the get-rich-quick proposition that many are seeking and all of us would like to find. Nut trees have well justified a reputation for slow growing but they are also long lived. Considerable cost and years of waiting must be spent before they come into profitable commercial production. They are not always a paying investment. They will have good and bad years in production and will, at times, miss a crop even under the best conditions of climate and location.

Nut groves do not require a great amount of labor at any time and after they come into production they yield at a low cost for labor. They are not grown nor do they produce without labor. We see trees growing as nature planted them. But nut groves are planted for man’s profit, so they require intelligent care to produce to capacity. We cannot let nature take its course. Nature is lavish, but nature is stern. She plants a thousand trees to produce one that is more certain to be hardy than to be fruitful. Man cannot afford nature’s way. He must plant a hundred trees and have a hundred producers.

Best of all is the fact that nuts are a product that will not spoil if one does not hurry them off to the market as soon as they are gathered. Nuts have considerable value for their bulk, so they can easily be carried to market. A hundred dollars worth of walnuts or filberts can be put into an ordinary auto without overloading it.

Nut trees are a permanent investment. Trees of walnut, chestnut, pecan, and filbert are producing profitably at the age of a hundred years and some individual trees are known to have produced for several times as long. Many of our nut trees make valuable timber. A slow growing tree like the hickory will hardly reach full bearing in a generation.

Some of our nut groves may have to be planted for posterity. We have robbed posterity ruthlessly and are still doing it. But people will call us fanatics when we talk of planting for posterity.

The name, nut, has been given to many seeds and even to certain fruits but the real nut grower considers only those tree seeds that have a real value. As we consider it, nut growing, it is a branch of permanent agriculture. Although the peanut competes with nuts in the market, it is an annual crop like beans and other vegetables.

In the selection of nuts from the grower’s and the consumer’s standpoint, several features are taken into consideration. Buyers first of all, want to know how easily the kernel can be extracted from the shell. This we call cracking quality. The nut is also judged by size, thickness of shell, and proportion of shell and kernel. The kernel is judged first by its skin or pellicle, which not only gives color but adds to its flavor, and secondly, by the flavor of its meat. But the grower must know more than this about a variety. He must know how fast growing the tree of a variety is—how soon it will bear—and how good a bearer it is, and whether the nut is easy or expensive to harvest.

The old world nuts were bred up through hundreds of generations of hit and miss selection to the size, quality and productiveness they now have. The so-called English walnut is popularly supposed to have been a small hard shelled nut when the cavemen first accidently dropped the nuts about their homes and became the first horticulturists. The original filbert was perhaps about the same as our American hazelnut but a much larger species of tree. The almond was developed in Asia, and spread over the milder sections of the old world. These, with the European and Asiatic chestnuts, have been the main contributions of the Eastern Hemisphere to what we regard as our commercial nuts.

FIGURE 2—NUTS FROM THE EAST AND THE WEST

Nuts from the East and the West find a place in American agriculture. Above we have filberts from Europe; below, heartnuts from Japan. Both were grown on the same farm in the Pacific Northwest.

FIGURE 3—HARVESTING FILBERTS

Nut groves such as this will replace the natural groves that once covered much of our country.

If we judge plant breeding in the older countries from nuts, we cannot regard it very highly. Agriculture in the culture of Europe has been carried on, for the most part, by a despised peasant class, with little knowledge of science and no agricultural literature. The upper class of soldiers, politicians and priests got most of the glory and about all the profits and other good things of life. Perhaps it is no wonder they have great armies, wonderful churches, and clever statesmen but cannot feed themselves.

The Chinese and Japanese both had a more intelligent attitude in regard to agriculture. Each of these peoples seem to have worked with chestnuts with considerable success. The Chinese bred their species so they come fairly true from seed and the Japanese developed a small nut into the largest chestnut of the world.

Here in America in the one generation of the past thirty years, we have accomplished more with nut trees than millions of people in the old world have accomplished in centuries of agricultural work. We have selected and adopted new and better varieties of European nuts, have selected American nuts, and are breeding many species of nuts for improvement and hardiness. We have developed new and improved methods of propagation for these slow growing and difficult trees.

When white men first came from Europe they found North America rich in natural nuts. The great hardwood forests of this continent contained many species of hickories, including the pecan, three black walnuts, the butternut, several species of chestnuts, and some hazels. We were naturally supplied with some nuts better than any of the original nuts of the Old World and more nuts of value to man than all the rest of the world contained. But native nut trees were an impediment to the development of the farms so were cut down and often burned to get them out of the way. Thus perhaps many trees bearing fine nuts were lost and certainly much land was cleared that would have been of more value if left in forests. There is a tendency to mourn the loss of our forests that were destroyed in building our agriculture. We have been destructive but we also have been productive. We can and no doubt shall, grow better trees and better nuts than we had in the past and perhaps better than if we had attempted to save the forests that are gone.

In America, as long as we had natural groves with plenty of nuts to be had for the gathering, there was no impelling reason to plant nut trees. With wild nuts selling cheaply there was not much incentive for the development of the better varieties. We are now selecting the best trees we can find and grafting from them with the idea of bringing again to this country better nut groves of our original nut species. The new groves that will in time grow up on our hills will be situated in those places where woodlands are more profitable than fields. They will be made up of the best varieties of the native nuts that can be found, together with nuts from other parts