I received one of
those surprises which sometimes occur when a tree is asexually
propagated when I grafted scions from this butternut on black walnut
stock. The resulting nuts were larger than those on the parent tree and
their hulls peeled off with almost no effort. Whether these features
continue after the trees become older is something I shall observe with
interest.
[Illustration: _Self hulling Butternut. Weschcke variety. Drawing by Wm.
Kuehn._]
The nearly self-hulling quality of these nuts makes them very clean to
handle. The absence of hulls in cracking butternuts not only does away
with the messiness usually involved, but also it allows more accurate
cracking and more sanitary handling of the kernels. In 1949 I noticed a
new type of butternut growing near the farm residence. This butternut
was fully twice as large as the Weschcke and had eight prominent ridges.
The nut proved to be even better than the older variety and we intend to
test it further by grafting it on butternuts and black walnut stocks.
Although hand-operated nutcrackers have been devised to crack these and
other wild nuts, they are not as fast as a hammer. If one protects the
hand by wearing a glove and stands the butternut on a solid iron base,
hitting the pointed end with a hammer, it is quite possible to
accumulate a pint of clean nut meats in half an hour.
Pages:
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108