apped very
firmly, with waxed muslin, just as we wrap patch buds.

Our success with grafting the English or Persian walnut, under northern
conditions, has been variable and not very satisfactory. With good
scions and good stocks and other favorable conditions, we have sometimes
gotten over 90 per cent to grow, but the stand is more often much below
this and the present season we did not average over 25 per cent. The
fact that we get good stands of grafts when all conditions are right, is
not only encouraging but demonstrates that the English walnut can be
grafted under eastern or northern conditions with at least a fair degree
of certainty as to results, just as soon as we learn the causes of our
failures and are thus able to apply the remedy. Perhaps the greatest
drawback to the successful grafting of the English walnut is the
difficulty of obtaining good scions. The annual growth of the walnut is
much more pithy than that of the pecan or shagbark, and for this reason,
only a comparatively small portion of the growth is available for
grafting purposes if we are able to select scions that will give the
best results. Like the pecan and shagbark, the two-year wood makes the
best scions for grafting, provided that the wood has good buds on it,
but under our conditions those buds that lie dormant are usually shed
off during the summer and few good buds remain that will start quickly
into active growth. It is true that adventitious buds will often form
where these buds have shed off, and these will push into growth if the
stock is kept free from sprouts, but usually too late in the season to
make good trees, and keeping the seedling stock free from sprouts when
it should be in leafage is more or less weakening and injurious and the
grafts, starting into growth late in the season, do not mature and ripen
their growth up properly before frost and are quite likely to be injured
by early November freezes, unless they have some protection. To graft
the English walnut with unvarying and satisfactory results, under
northern conditions, we must not only have good scions and good stocks,
but we must control the sap flow in the stocks. In Florida and Louisiana
the sap came up more gradually in the stocks in the spring, and when or
root pruned stocks would probably give the best results, as the sap
would probably come up more gradually in the spring and, while the flow
would probably be sufficient for the best results, it would not flow