its, the nuts lack flavor and quality. They have size and beauty, but
lack quality. The fruits and nuts grown on the Pacific Coast all lack a
certain fineness of character, for some reason yet unknown.

You have got to look after your European hazels, and not neglect the
orchard. I remember seeing some very beautiful apple trees in central
Maine not very long ago--no blight--no codling moth, and the trees free
from almost everything in the way of insects or fungous
troubles--beautiful, cultivated trees, and beautiful apples on them. I
asked another man, one of my acquaintances there, an old farmer, why he
didn't set out a lot of similar trees and make a good income. He said,
"Well, it won't go." He had a pasture about eight miles north of there,
and, said he, "I spent thirty dollars for apple trees to put into an
orchard, and I had great ideas about those apples. I set the trees out
in that orchard about three or four years ago, and last year when I went
up to look at them, there were hardly any apple trees left." He hadn't
looked at them for three or four years. (Laughter.) You can't raise
hazels that way.

THE SECRETARY: The reason I asked about the commercial value of the
hazel is that my own experience has been very unsatisfactory. I got some
hazels from Gillet, on the Pacific Coast six or seven years ago, set
them out around my place, and they have grown beautifully. I haven't
been able to detect any blight on them anywhere. Some of them are
fifteen feet high, have grown luxuriantly, and blossom every year, but I
haven't seen one nut yet. On the other hand, the other day I visited a
man near my home, who told me that he had raised some trees from nuts
which he had bought from an Italian grocery on the corner. He gets the
nuts when the crop first comes in, and stratifies in wet sand all
winter, and he says they all grow. He had some beautiful hazel trees.
One I estimated to be twenty feet high. I never saw a hazel tree which
approached it. He said it was only five or six years old. Last year he
had a fine crop of nuts from it. This year, however, he said that during
a warm spell in the winter the staminate bloom came out and was killed,
and there were no nuts on the trees. Now it seems to me that there is
great uncertainty about the hazels, and I don't know exactly what to
advise people to do. People ask me for advice as to what nuts to plant
commercially. I don't know whether to advise them to plant hazels or
not,