at 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 protrud