The first 10 years, by Roland Clark

Some people think that we in Tree
Crops have achieved very little, pointing
out that we do not yet have any viable commercial orchards.  I think they are talking a
lot of nonsense.  Long ago I said it would probably take us 20 years before we would be
making big money out of our crops.  This July
saw the 10th anniversary of the first meeting
at DSIR Lincoln when we formed the Tree
Crops Committee.

At that stage all we knew was that nuts
grew on nut trees, but we had no idea what
constituted a good nut or how we could produce them.  Obviously it would not be easy
or the nurserymen would have featured
grafted trees in their catalogues instead of
advertising seedlings.

The first breakthrough came from a
Czechoslovakian report detailing how they
had been able to graft walnuts during the
winter, using a chamber which would maintain a temperature of 26°C for three weeks. 
We tried it and it worked in a fitful way. 
Success rates were about 50%.

That meant that we could select a top
grade walnut and collect scion wood off its
parent tree, graft it and eventually harvest a
nut similar to the original.  Further the grafted
tree would bear in a third of the time of the
average seedling.  Today our best propagators
like Chris Ryan, Vernon Harrison, Dave
Murdoch, Guy Goldsborough and others
achieve far better success rates (but never get
round to telling us how they manage it).

The Tree Crops Association walnut trial at Orton Bradley Park near Christchurch demonstrates the importance of site. The miserable trees barely visible in the foreground are in a part of the paddock that gets very wet, the excellent ones further back are on a well-drained knob.

We started off like typical Kiwis thinking we
were bound to find the best nuts overseas
and we spent a lot of time and effort importing overseas cultivars.  Today we know better,
realising that the best trees for our purposes
will be grafted to local selections which have
proved themselves here under our conditions
of climate and soil.  For instance the Californian trees are selected where the summer
climate hovers around 40°C and winters are
cold enough to prevent brass monkeys from
becoming fathers.  We have a maritime,
reasonably equable, climate.

Rex Baker of the Walnut Action Group will
endorse this after having judged 15,000
walnuts sent to him from all over New
Zealand.  The best nut is from a seedling,
about 45 years old and growing on a hillside
badly affected by slips.  He says it is far better
than anything he has seen from overseas.  In
addition, we have been disappointed at the
performance of overseas material grown in
Canterbury.  Rex would be the first to emphasise that, while this may be the best nut for
Canterbury, it may not be so good for the
humid, fungus ridden pastures of the North
Island.

I planted more than 100 grafted walnuts on
my farm but it was a waste of time because
I did not have enough shelter from that
vicious norwester and because we get a
stinging late frost every other year which kills
the new growth.  These negative findings are
as important as many of the more positive
ones.  We now know that walnuts are
demanding in their climate.

Well-known nurseryman Clarry Jones beside one of the excellent walnuts in the dry area of the trial

We learned a lot from the hazels we
planted at home.  There is not one we would
recommend now, but they were the best
available at the time. We did not know which
were the best cultivars, which yielded well,
which pollinated which, which were subject
to big bud mite etc.  Today we can recommend and supply far better hazels, inter-
pollinating pairs like Barcelona and White-
skin filbert, Ennis and Butler, Tondo Romano
and Tondo Griffoni.  We understand the
importance of producing nuts which branch
satisfactorily, know which yield well and can
produce them at a reasonable price.  Hamish
Deans and the Hazel Action Group have
done an excellent job.

Chestnuts are still an unknown quantity —
or the North Island boys are keeping their
knowledge to themselves.  We have found
good nuts, know how to graft them and
believe there is a good future for them as a
commercial crop.  But none of the experts like
my good friend lan Howat, will tell us which
nut they think is the one to plant or which
is pollinated by which.  The best of my knowledge is that W1005 is the best all round nut
and is pollinated by W1011.  Ian, is that your
opinion?

We have sizeable plantings of macadamias
going in.  My contact here is Don Boyes-
Barnes who has worked out a system of
producing grafted trees.  The two he gave me
are growing well on Banks Peninsula.

And I see Owen Long is producing pecan
trees.  Good on him.  One enthusiast like him
will get more done than a dozen scientists
— unless they, too, are enthusiasts.

As we met and talked together, the field
for Tree Crops widened.  John Smith initiated
the search for trees which could provide out-
of-season forage for bees and Chris van
Kraayenoord and he produced a world first
in their chart showing the flowering time for
willows.  Using it, you can feed bees any week you like by planting the appropriate
willow.  Canterbury beekeepers now have
their own bee tucker orchard for growing
willows.  Again we planted a lot of supposedly
perfect bee forage trees, most of which were
useless in our climate.

We need to look at trees for feeding stock.
Trevor Lennard at Te Puke is our leader here
with his honey locust trees.  We should have
a properly conducted trial, incorporating the
best of the oaks (supplied by Don Hamilton
our oak expert from Katikati). We have someone somewhere working on growing carobs
which make up the biggest export from
Cyprus and which could provide winter
tucker in our drought areas.  We should incorporate apples and pears in the trial — just
think of the tonnage of fruit they drop each
year v and Don Mackenzie recommends we
try sweet cider apples because they have not
been weakened by generations of sprays.

Doug Davies is a familiar figure to us all.
I think his work on tagasaste could be the
most important idea to come out of Tree
Crops.  Farmers in drought prone areas still
rely on ryegrass pastures which we know will
fail every time we have a drought. Imagine
how delighted they would be if they had a
bank of feed ready for the dry time in the
form of tagasaste (commonly called tree
lucernel just as they provide a bank of feed
for the winter months in the form of swedes
and turnips.  He is responsible for the full-
scale trial on our Canterbury president’s farm
on the driest part of the Banks Peninsula. 
Alistair and Jennifer Menzies are leading the
way in what could become a revolution in
pastoral farming.

We are looking at trees for oil production.
There are a few olives in Christchurch, one
at St Matthews Church in Cranford Street is
loaded with olives this year and as it is the
only one anywhere round, I deduce that
olives are self fertile.  There are some very
heavily fruiting trees at Waipara in North
Canterbury, good selections which can be
struck from cuttings.

There is a whole field of trees grown
specially for firewood.  Thanks to the proliferation of log burners there is very little
available firewood but Bill Brandenburg and
David Jackson are planting a coppice at
Lincoln this spring.  We should be involved.

We should be planting trees whose wood
does not rot in the ground on the farms to
provide home grown posts.  The Gisborne
branch took me to see Bob Bell’s plantation
of Catalpa speciosa.  He used the trees for
setting up his vineyard instead of buying
vastly expensive treated posts.  He might have
used Robina Pseudoacacia, like the farmer
who came into the Queenstown conference
with a post of Robinia which had been in the
ground for 40 years.  He was going to turn
it end for end.  The Scots settled South Otago.

So where are we after 10 years?  We have
developed the idea of using trees which can
produce an annual crop and we have spread
the word so that our journal now goes to
10,000 people.  We have selected elite trees
and developed propagation methods. We
have planted many trees and got a lot of
information from them, both positive and
negative.  We see some second generation
plantings, better than the first ones, going in.
We have tapped the brains of overseas
experts like Maxine Thompson, lchiro Kajiura
and Pierre-Jean Averseng, bringing them here
and visiting them in their own countries.

We have made many people more aware of the importance of trees and we have
encouraged them to go ahead and have a go
themselves.  And I think we have had a great
deal of fun.

A successful method of layering hazels. The subject is a Barcelona from Oregon which was grafted. The long scion was bent over from right to left of the photo and pinned down to the ground last spring. A couple of boards were put on either side and filled in between with sawdust Hormone powder was put on the bottom of the scion where each downward facing bud had been removed. The result was seven first-rate, well-rooted layers this winter.

There is plenty of challenge ahead in our
changing world.  The knowledge we have
won may be invaluable to third world countries. Plenty of new fields are ahead.  There
is nothing stopping us getting involved in the
protea family of flowers, many of which are
borne on shrubs and trees.  I think some of
us should be looking at a crop of beauty from
our trees and I think of the glorious colours
of sugar maples in the autumn, the rich russet
colours of English oak leaves still on the tree
till they are cast aside in the spring, and the
beautiful patterns on the barks of our maritime pines in Hagley Park.

We are concerned with some of the minor
fruits like the feijoas.  I wish our Taranaki
branch would write in and tell us something
of what they have learned.  I would like to
read more about citrus, figs and mulberries.

I would like to see how the Irish manage
their willow plantations so that they can be
cropped annually for fuel.  They have devised
a system whereby they can heat their greenhouses from this home grown fuel, which
gives them the equivalent of seven tonnes of
coal per hectare a year.

And all the time we must remember that,
though the association must be financially
viable, money is not the only objective.  The
mass of our members are interested in trees
because they are interesting.  From this mass,
those who wish to make a few bob can
branch out, opening new fields but remembering that they are but a branch of the main
trunk which must give back information and
help at the same time they receive it.

From GROWING TODAY AUGUST 1985

McKenzie award to Bernard Vavasour

Some time ago Dr Don McKenzie, a
founder member ofthe Tree Crops Association gave the association a fossil walnut
(Juglans tephrodes UNG). This walnut was set
in resin and mounted onto a walnut base by
Mr Reg Williams of Henderson Intermediate
School at no cost to the Association. As Mr
Williams is not a member of the association
this gesture is much appreciated.

The Trophy and its craftsman

Delegates at the AGM of the NZTCA conference held at Hamilton in May decided that
the first recipient of this award would be
Bernard Vavasour of Blenheim. While
Bernard Vavasour has been a long-time
member of TCA the award was made principally for work done during 1984. The production of the book Growing Walnuts was
acknowledged as a major contribution, being
the first of its kind produced by a Tree Crops’
member on one of our crops.

The award will be presented to another
member at next year’s conference and
advance publicity will be sent out to enable
branches to nominate people for this attractive trophy. We are hoping to obtain further
details about the fossil walnut apart from the
fact that it was retrieved from a German coal
field and is calculated to be 8-9 million years
old.

From GROWING TODAY AUGUST 1985