It
might have been, too, if the roads in the country hadn't been rough and
frozen so hard that they hammered on the solid, unresisting tires and
spokes until, almost within sight of the farm, one wheel dismally
collapsed. As the wheel broke, the trailer slid off the road into a
ditch, so that it was necessary to send on to the farm for the plow
horses to haul out the car, the trailer and the trees. The horses
finished hauling the trees to that part of the farm where holes had been
dug for them. I had told my tenant to dig large holes and large holes he
had certainly dug! Most of them were big enough to bury one of the
horses in. Such was my amateurish first endeavor.
It was not until December of that year, 1919, that the twenty-eight
trees were finally planted. Although the ground was already somewhat
frozen and the trees poorly planted as a result, most of them started to
grow in the spring. They would probably be living now if I had not been
too ambitious to convert them from seedlings into grafted varieties such
as the Ohio, Thomas and Stabler, which I had learned of during a
winter's study of available nut-culture lore. I obtained scionwood from
J. F. Jones, part of which I put on these abused trees and the remainder
of which I grafted on butternut trees.
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