oject which sparked
the entrance into the manufacture of filbert butter was the success that
I was having with hybridizing our best native hazels with the best known
filberts, such as crossing of the wild American hazel with Barcelona,
DuChilly, Italian Red, Purple Aveline, Red Aveline, White Aveline, also
filbert strains from J. U. Gellatly of Westbank, B. C., Canada, and
strains from J. F. Jones, hybrids, European strains of filberts from the
Carpathian mountains, and any right pollen which could be obtained from
known filbert parents. Today we have over 2,000 seedling hybrids of
which between 500 and 600 have come into bearing. Some of these are
really surprising varieties of the combination hazels and filberts, but
a complete history of the hybridization work and the results really
deserve a separate account to be published some time in the future. I
merely mention this because the success of these plants in producing
nuts leads me to contemplate the future production of these hybrid nuts,
called Hazilberts,[4] on a large scale.

[4] Another coined name, by Mr. Gellatly, is "Filazel."

My problem was to engineer a scheme whereby I could interest farmers in
setting out small acreages of these plants and guarantee that there
would be a market when the plants produced nuts, which would be in about
three years from the time they were planted. Seeing that the filbert
producers in the west were struggling for a better market, since
conditions were not too favorable for the filbert in its competition
with the foreign nuts and the California produced Persian walnut, I
decided that nuts in the shell were a little bit old-fashioned. Many of
our prominent members of the NNGA have from time to time advised the
marketing of nut kernels rather than nuts in their natural containers,
and I thought a step in the right direction would be to manufacture a
ready-to-eat product from the kernels. And what could be nicer than a
butter similar to peanut butter?

So I began scouring the market for a grinding machine that would grind
filberts to the consistency of a smooth peanut butter. My first machine
was a Hobart peanut grinder. When buying this machine the mistake I made
was to let the agent of the manufacturer demonstrate how good it was to
grind Spanish peanuts; I should have had it tested on filberts as they
are much tougher, even though they do carry more oil. This machine was
installed, but it was a complete failure and I decided