"We have scattering seedling pecans growing on all of the different types of soils in the state of Louisiana; and while they do not grow so large on the poor hill lands, some of them bear good quantities of nuts."
Testimony as to the upland growth of the pecan east of the Mississippi River can be piled up almost indefinitely.
A great many of the large trees of the North and East, including most of those previously mentioned, are on upland.[1]
In my experimental nursery on a slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains, fifteen miles southwest of Harpers Ferry, two vatieties of pecans (Busscron and Buttcrick) bore well-developed nuts three years[2] after they were grafted. They did this in the cool season of 1926. Soil is one thing, but frost is another. Late frosts are as deadly to pecans as to most other blooming plants. Hence the following advice from one of the pioneer pecan experimenters, Mr. T. P. Littlepage, who has an orchard between Washington. D. C, and Baltimore, "Under no circumstances should northern nut trees be set on low land. The northern pecan on my farm is just as subject to frost as peaches or more so. As a result I do not think I will have a peck of pecans this year on thirty acres. But I am equally sure that were they on nice high peach land, the average successful crops would be equal to those of peaches or apples."
- ↑ Mr. B. T. Bethune, Georgia wrote in the Rural New Yorker, February 3, 1912:
In Middle Georgia in the 'Red old hills of Georgia' underlaid with granite, we have pecan trees more than three feet in diameter three feet above ground whose branches reach a height of seventy feet, with a spread of sixty feet, and which have born successive crops without a single failure for three-quarters of a century.
Elsewhere in his article Mr. Bethune speaks of a tree from which over nine bushels of nuts had been sold. "That tree grew on a poor ridge in the pine woods a few miles south of this city." Alas I cannot learn what city.
"On the grounds of the Mimosa Hotel, near Tryon, North Carolina, there is a seedling pecan tree that bears well. The clevation is about 1.200 feet." (The Pecan and Its Culture, G. Harold Hume, p. 21.)
- ↑ These trees were eight to ten feet high and about one tree in fifty or sixty bore fruit.
