ARIZONA PECANS

THE man from Arizona was a lunatic. For three days he had been telling whoppers about the way his pecan trees grew in Yuma Valley, until everybody had set him down as an amiable liar. But it had turnout to be something more serious than mendacity. He had demonstrated insanity of a type that might prove dangerous. "What do you do," he asked when he got the chairman's attention, "to keep your trees from getting so many nuts that the limbs break in the fall?"

A hush fell over the hall. Pitying glances were turned on the ruddy Westerner with the whitening hair. Gently it was explained to the unfortunate madman that pecan trees never set enough nuts to overload their limbs. The difficulty was always to induce them to set and mature enough nuts to make a commercial crop.

So Frank W. Creswell went back to his twenty-acre grove near Somerton and began wedging posts under the limbs of his pecan trees to keep them from breaking under their load of nuts. He had honestly asked for information and failed to get it, because nobody in the South believed it possible for pecan trees to bear the way they bear in Arizona. In fact, most of the delegates at the National Pecan Association convention, where Creswell demonstrated his dementia, doubted if it was possible for pecan trees to grow at all in Arizona. In that dry desert? A pecan tree would curl up and die in the hot wind if it got a start. This happened in 1925 or 1926. At that time few Arizonans had any more idea than those Southerners did that Arizona's irrigated valleys were particularly adapted to pecan culture. They did not know that with controlled water, in deep soil, with a longer growing season, and free from all insect or scale pests, a pecan tree would grow bigger and faster, produce many more nuts of higher quality than in its native habitat along the river bottoms of the Cotton Belt.

Today all these are demonstrated facts, and admitted even in the South. For size, no Southern papershells compare with Arizona's. Only their very finest compare with ours in flavor, and they come from groves which yield no more to the acre than is harvested from many an individual tree in Yuma or Salt River Valley. With over 4,000 acres in commercial orchards, not to mention many "ditch bank plantings," the pecan is recognized as one of Arizona's most profitable crops. Of course it is still down toward the bottom of the list in dollar returns, but just wait until all those orchards are in full production.

It takes pecan trees of the best varieties eight or nine years to come into commercial bearing. That is the main reason why Arizonans were so slow to get excited about the nut industry after such pioneers as Frank S. Ingalls, Frank W. Creswell, A. R. Heineman, Thomas Hall and Ernest Hall proved the pecan potentialities of their State. It is also the reason why the great expansion that began about 1930 has not been much more rapid. The depression, falling prices, other vicissitudes, forced farmers to put their land into crops that could be counted on for immediate returns.

But those who have pecan groves approaching maturity are sitting on top of the world. Well, no, not exactly. They do have their troubles. Fancy nuts that used to bring 50 cents a pound are now worth 25 or less. Difficulties more perplexing than Creswell's overloading problem are continually arising-and being solved. On the whole the owner of a good grove that has not been neglected is in a fortunate position. He can look forward to increasing yields for the next hundred years or so, with never a crop failure. No fear of frost, which never occurs at or after blooming time nor returns before the harvest. No fear of the pests that devastate Southern grovesat least as long as the present rigid quarantine against out-of-state pecan nursery stock is maintained.

Oldest pecan tree in Arizona is still thriving in front of the Ingalls home in the city of Yuma. It was in 1894 that Frank Ingalls planted a few nuts sent him by a Texas friend. No care was taken of the little seedlings and only one survived. In 1900 it began to bear, and it has been bearing steadily ever since.

Mr. Ingalls exhibited some pecans from this tree at the Territorial Fair in 1908. Nobody paid much attention except Thomas Hall, Salt River Valley fruit grower, and his son, Ernest. They talked Mr. Ingalls out of his exhibition nuts, planted them the next year along the ditches on their adjoining farms southwest of Phoenix.

The Halls, however, were only mildly interested. They paid little attention and most of the seedlings were trampled into the ground by stock. Among the few that lived was one that grew into Arizona's most celebrated pecan tree, the Hall Taxpaper. It was given this name because Tom Hall said that for a number of years it yielded him over $100 annually and paid the taxes on his place. The larger, specially selected nuts brought him $1 a pound for planting purposes; the rest those the family did not eat or give away proudly as samples -sold for half a dollar.

Of course, they were only seedling nuts with hard shells, small by presentday standards, but excellent eating. The era of the budded papershell tree in Arizona was yet to arrive. Up to that time experimenters merely planted nuts, hoping the resulting trees would produce pecans in the same abundance and quality as the parents did. Frequently they did not. Pecan genetics, like those of most domestic fruits, are badly mixed. The only way to be sure is to take a bud from a tree of known variety and quality, insert it in the bark of a seedling, and grow the new tree from the bud sprout.

In 1920 Frank Creswell ordered 300 budded trees from a nursery in the South-15 varieties, for he had no idea which would prove best suited to his conditions. Only 97 of them lived, for he was also without experience in planting and tending pecan trees. The casualties were replaced the following year.

In the face of difficulties and disappointments that would have discouraged any man of less vision and enthusiasm, Creswell kept on. He quickly learned that most of the varieties he had chosen at random either would not live at all, would not produce well, or would not produce nuts of the supreme quality toward which he was aiming. In groping about for the right kinds he topworked some of his trees three or four times. That is, he converted them to other varieties by pruning back severely, inserting cions, and allowing no new growth to spring from the original wood. This is a laborious and expensive process; but eventually it paid Mr. Creswell modestly in cash, immeasurably in the satisfaction of proving that Yuma Valley is "pecan country." He knew that all his failures and mistakes were chargeable to his own ignorance. The answers were not to be had down South, where he was laughed at for asking how to keep his(Turn to Page 34)