There is always a natural mortality in planting trees, but in those first years, lacking badly-needed experience, I lost more than 75%.  Nearly all of them started to grow but died during the first few winters.  Those which survived were the start of a nursery filled with hardy trees which can endure the climate of the north.  In looking back, I appreciate how fortunate I was in having sought and received advice from experienced nurserymen.  Had I not done so, frequent failures would surely have discouraged me.  As it was, the successes I did have were an incentive which made me persist and which left me with faith enough in an ultimate success to go on buying seeds and trees and to make greater and more varied experiments.

Chapter 3

BLACK WALNUTS

I have spent more of my time cultivating black walnuts than any other kind of nut tree and given more of my ground area over to them.  Yet it was with no great amount of enthusiasm that I started working with these trees.  Obviously there could be nothing new or extraordinary resulting from my planting trees of this species either on my farm or at my St. Paul home, since there already were mature, bearing black walnut trees at both places.  It was only with the idea that they would be an attractive addition to the native butternut groves that I decided to plant some black walnut seedlings.

This did not prove feasible as I first attempted it.  I had engaged a Mr. Miller at St. Peter to procure wild black walnut trees for me since they grew near that town.  He was to dig these trees with as much of the root system included as possible and ship them to my farm.  But the winter season came before this had been accomplished and both Mr. Miller and I, deciding the idea was not as practical as we had hoped it would be, abandoned it.  Later that same autumn I found that a nursery just outside of St. Paul had several rows of overgrown black walnut trees which they would sell me quite reasonably.  I bought them and sent instructions to the tenant at my farm to dig twenty-eight large holes in which to plant them.  Packed in straw and burlap, the trees weighed about 500 pounds, I found.  This was much too heavy and cumbersome to pack in my old touring car, so I hunted around for some sort of vehicle I could attach to my car as a trailer.  In an old blacksmith shop, I came upon an antiquated pair of buggy wheels.  They looked as though they were ready to fall apart but I decided that with repairs and by cautious driving, they might last out the trip of thirty-five miles.  So I paid the blacksmith his asking price—­twenty-five cents.  The spokes rattled and the steel tires were ready to roll off their wooden rims but the axles were strong.  My father-in-law and I puttered and pounded, strengthened and tightened, until we felt our semi-trailer was in good-enough order.  It might have been, too, if the roads in the country hadn’t been rough