owing chestnut trees and planting them from seed. You could make a
great contribution if you would take the nuts from each individual tree
and plant separately, so that you will know in the future the origin of
every one of those seedling trees you have. Some of these days someone
is going to find one that is going to give us seedling trees that are
good and free from variation.

Elberta peach seed will come practically true to variety from seed,
except minor variations of size, shape, color and season. In a peach you
are facing a very highly specialized market. But with the Chinese
chestnut, color is not so important. What we are interested in is trees
that bear and have enough uniformity so that we don't have pee-wees by
one and jumbos by another.

We need very badly this sort of thing. We need chestnut varieties
planted in pairs in isolated places. Any of you folks could do a great
service if you will let us know wherever trees occur in pairs, or just
two varieties and no others, and then we know that one variety
pollinates the other. When you have a mixed planting of a half dozen
varieties the male is promiscuous. Therefore you have a much greater
mixing of genetic factors. If we have a pair of trees, we get a much
more uniform breeding group of seedlings.

MEMBER: How far removed from other varieties do they have to be?

DR. McKAY: Half a mile or a mile.

MR. O'ROURKE: I think we can go to vegetative propagation of cuttings. I
think that we have any amount of evidence that Chinese chestnuts can be
rooted from cuttings, but can trees grow on from rooting cuttings?

DR. CRANE: You have summed up the situation perfectly.

MEMBER: Just by accident, in our storage house a couple of chestnuts
fell over into a pile of peat moss and they did make roots.

MR. CORSAN: Would you call the Chinese chestnut a second?

MR. O'ROURKE: We should confine this only to propagation. While there
are any number of interesting phases of it, we have to stick to
propagation or we will never get through. We have had remarks on layers.
Any comments on layers?

Let's move on to graftage. We want to have our chestnut produced on a
quantity basis so I am going to ask Mr. Bernath to tell us a good
method.

MR. BERNATH: I don't graft too many outside, but I do my propagating in
the greenhouse. I had more than a thousand graftings growing, some of
them this high [indicating] which greatly depends upon the root system
and the condition o