of watching the weevils
actually emerging. You can pick the nuts out about February, and you can
select all the nuts that are sound. Once in awhile a weevil will live
through the winter. One thing we should all be thinking about is that
the nurseryman has to produce grafted trees in order to fill a demand,
and those nut trees must be produced cheaply and he must use methods
which are highly efficient.

MEMBER: Has anyone tried to deep freeze?

DR. CRANE: We tried that just this past winter. For a couple of years
back one individual had asked us why we didn't freeze them. Last winter
we did. We stored three gallon buckets at two temperatures. One at zero
and the other at ten degrees below--hard freezing temperatures. Those
nuts stayed frozen from early October until the next April. We brought
them out and examined them one morning. The first thing we did was taste
them. Those nuts we ate when first opened and you could tell them from
no other chestnuts. They were nice eating, sweet. We let those chestnuts
thaw evenly at room temperature. That evening we examined them and it's
hard to describe what the transformation was in those nuts. In the first
place was the deterioration that had gone on as soon as the tissue
thawed ... They were dripping water. The tissue had burst and the water
just flowed. On the other hand, about an hour after they thawed out,
when we first examined them just as they thawed out, you would be amazed
at how tender they were. They would melt in your mouth. Freezing
apparently breaks down the tissue. The tissue is as soft as it can be.
Apparently this freezing transformed some of the starch to sugar. The
rub is that it won't keep for even two or three hours.

MEMBER: They might keep if you put them in the soil first.

DR. CRANE: The tissue is ruined.

MR. O'ROURKE: We have now decided certain things pertaining to seed
germination. Then we are confronted with the problems of seedling versus
clonal rootstocks. I do not know whether or not there have been clonal
rootstocks selected for Chinese chestnut. I am sorry to have to ask Dr
McKay to talk again but he knows more about it.

DR. McKAY: I can only tell you about the experiment we started this
spring on clonal stocks of chestnuts. We have just this year's results.
Unfortunately we didn't get good results. We took ten seedling trees. We
used nursery trees, large five-year old trees, with vigorous root
system, ten seedlings, and got from them 20