ned to ask for them, and shipped a lot of them free. But along in
the early 1940's he began to find out what he had, and he started
selling seed and made a pretty good thing out of it.

Last year was the first year that we had gotten seed from that
plantation. We got 75 pounds of good nuts taken in the fall of 1947.

We have another orchard, another plantation that led us to become
interested, I guess, in producing blight-resistant chestnut as a game
food and along forestry lines, and that is the orchard that we have on
nursery property. It was one of the early ones, and I expect one of the
earliest in the state, but it was planted along back in 1936, fifty-one
trees.

When we started in this we didn't know anything about it at all, so we
have built up our small knowledge in the last few years. But it didn't
take us long to realize that our orchard on our nursery property was of
badly crossed material, and it had some very undesirable trees. If we
succeeded in doing anything with them as a game food we would have to
eliminate, and only last year did we get around to the place where we
could secure authority to eliminate the undesirable species. We have
about half of the stand left now, but we are pretty sure that the trees
that we do have are of good strain.

It might be interesting for you to note--maybe some of you can top
it--we were interested when this orchard was planted, in what would
happen if the trees were planted and allowed to grow as a forest stand.
So they were planted in six-by-six spacing. Of course, we got a lot of
self-pruning and a lot of competition, as we would in forests by the
trees growing up and competing with each other and reaching for height
and light. Some of them died and some were so badly suppressed that they
failed to make any growth at all. But there is one tree that we still
have in that orchard that we are proud of, not from the standpoint of
nut production, nor does it produce a very good nut as far as the human
taste is concerned. But it has made a single stick that far surpasses
any other tree we have in the orchard. It looks like a forest tree. In
1945--it might be hard for you to believe--it grew nine feet. That isn't
an exaggeration. It was measured. We thought that was a lot better than
fair growth. Of course, it hasn't made any growth like that since, and I
don't think it ever did before, but it just had the push to go and went
nine feet in one growing season.

Leaving th