until near frost but these did not amount to anything and I consider it
undesirable. I have never seen No. 2 tree produce late blooms and burs.

I might tell a few things as to how I handle my nuts. As is well said by
Mr. Reed in his 1946 article about chestnuts they should be gathered
daily (although I sometimes don't carry this out). After weighing I dump
the nuts in a tub of water. The nuts which are beginning to spoil will
practically all float and the sound nuts will sink. This is where the
largest percentage of my culls is eliminated. Some good nuts will float
but very few if the nuts are gathered daily. I then put 20 to 25 pounds
of nuts in a coarse mesh burlap bag. I use chicken scratch feed bags
mostly as these are a nice size, and ties a string near the top of the
bag. Then I place these on a lath frame which is about 12" above the
ground under a large pecan tree which furnishes shade about 3/4 of the
day. I arrange the nuts in the bag so it will be flat, which does not
allow more than 2 or 3 nuts to be on top of each other.

On days of moderate temperature I wet these bags thoroughly with water
once a day but on very hot or windy days I often wet them twice. This
keeps the nuts moist most of the time and lowers the temperature
considerably from the evaporation. In this way I can keep the nuts days
and days and even weeks with very little change except a slight drying.
If any spoiled nuts were missed by the water these too will show up in
about 10 days with specks of white mold and can be eliminated. The other
nuts seem to be as good as the day they were gathered. I only use this
to keep them temperarily (as it is some trouble to wet them) and mostly
for the eating nuts until I can take them to market or put them on cold
storage (30 deg. to 35 deg.F.) If I attempt to hold seed nuts about a week or
more I pack in damp sphagnum in crates and keep these under the shade
tree with excellent results. This year I used green sphagnum with all
its water and the nuts seemed to keep well in it. Some nuts have been in
damp sphagnum for over 5 weeks now and are in excellent shape except for
a few that spoiled at first (which I am quite sure were bad to begin
with). If too much water is used some nuts will begin sprouting but it
is surprising how much they can stand and show no tendency to sour.

I am of the opinion that the chestnuts in my section get ripe
prematurely and that at a time when we often have our hottest and