rapidly and produce annually.  However, they were not easy to graft, the stubborn reluctance of the butternut top to accept transplantation to a foreign stock being well known.  This factor will probably always cause grafted butternut trees to be higher in price than black walnut or hickory.  The reverse graft, i.e., black walnut on butternut should never be practiced for although successful, the black walnut overgrows the stock and results in an unproductive tree.  Specimens 25 or more years old prove this to be a fact.

Butternut trees are good feeders.  They respond well to cultivation and lend themselves to being grafted upon, although, from my own experience, I question their usefulness as a root stock.  I have found that when I grafted black walnuts, English walnuts or heartnuts on butternut stock, the top or grafted part of the tree became barren except for an occasional handful of nuts, even on very large trees.  Since this has occurred throughout the many years of my nut culture work, I think it should be given serious consideration before butternut is used as a root stock for other species of nut trees.

[Illustration:  Weschcke Butternut.  Smooth shallow convolutions of shell allow kernels to drop out freely.  Drawing by Wm. Kuehn.]

I had the good luck to discover an easy-cracking variety of butternut in River Falls, Wisconsin, in 1934, which I have propagated commercially and which carries my name.  A medium-sized nut, it has the requisite properties for giving it a varietal name, for it cracks mostly along the sutural lines and its internal structure is so shallow that the kernel will fall out if a half-shell is turned upside down.  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.