not probable that an orchard, even
from one of these unusual bearers, can be obtained which will not
occasionally miss a crop.

The influence of the stock upon the scion is something that has not yet
been fully worked out, and for that reason it is impossible to say why
the grafted or budded tree does not always take on the bearing qualities
of the parent, although it is pretty safe to say that as a rule its
qualities are very closely approximated, and by careful selection it is
possible to get grafted and budded trees that begin bearing very early
and bear with a great degree of regularity.

In visiting a tree while the nuts are green, one can get some idea as to
its bearing quality by the number and size of the clusters hanging on
the limbs. A tree that is a poor bearer, or bears only a fair crop,
usually bears its nuts in clusters of one to three, while a good bearer
produces clusters of from three to six. I have seen as many as eight
nuts in a cluster in the South, and have seen some clusters of seven on
some of our Indiana trees, but as a rule good bearing trees of the
Indiana group have clusters of about four to five nuts each.

After the tree qualities have been determined, it is then necessary to
consider the nut itself. The nut must be of fair size, of good flavor,
thin to medium thickness of shell, well filled, and of good cracking
quality--that is, the conformation of the shell and kernel must be such
that a large percentage of the kernels can be taken out as whole halves,
and the convolutions of the kernels must be wide enough that the
partitions do not adhere to them. When all of these qualities, both of
the tree and nut, can be combined, we then have a desirable tree from
which to propagate, and it is very surprising how few come up to the
standard. In one wild grove in Kentucky, on the banks of the Ohio River
just across from Indiana, near the mouth of the Green River, there are
nearly 300 acres of wild pecan trees. In this grove are perhaps more
than a thousand trees, and so far as I have been able to determine up to
date, there are but three trees out of the whole grove that come near my
notion of the standard.

Sometimes, however, a tree or a nut may grade up so high on some one
point as to make it a desirable variety from which to propagate, even
though it does not grade high on other desirable points. For example,
one of the most desirable southern pecans, perhaps, considering only the
nut itsel