Walnut Growing in Oregon Part 8

While the weight of the kernel is of great importance to the consumer, the taste and digestibility is still more so. In this is the food value of the walnut. The food value will in time be the commercial value.

There is very little variation in the taste of any one variety of wild nuts or fruits, but the cultivated walnut, as well as the cultivated peach and apple, has a great variety of tastes, and it does not require an expert to distinguish the good from the poor qualities.

Walnuts should be graded as to variety, the varieties should then be graded as to size, but the paramount duty of the grower is to produce a creamy, delicious walnut of excellent flavor. The soil and climate has proven their excellence, and it is now for the intelligent grower to do his part.

WHO SHOULD INVEST

Professional men and women, business men and women, those living in cities and towns and confined to offices, stores and factories, will find an investment in forty or fifty acres of walnut land at the present time wholly within their possibilities. Special terms can be arranged and their groves planted and cared for at small cost. While they are working their groves will be growing toward maturity, and in less than a decade they may be free from the demands of daily routine: the grove will furnish an income, increasing each season until the twentieth year, and will prove the most pleasant kind of old age annuity, and the richest inheritance a man could leave his children.

The practical farmer, or the inexperienced man who desires to escape the tyranny of city work by way of the soil will find that a walnut grove offers an immediate home, a living from small fruits and vegetables while his trees are maturing, and at the end of eight or ten years, the beginning of an income that will every year thereafter increase, while the labor exacted will gradually lessen until it amounts to practically nothing. Like rearing children, a walnut grower's troubles are over with the trees' infant days.

The capitalist can find no better place for his money than safely invested in Oregon walnut lands; the rise is certain and near.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The "Meat" of the Walnut_]

Some years ago "Outlook," a most conservative publication, spoke of the English walnut as "a tree of vast commercial importance in the far west."

Luther Burbank states: "The consumption of walnuts is increasing among all civilized nations faster than any other food."

CONCLUSION

B. M. Lelong, Secretary of the California State Board of Horticulture, wrote in 1896:

"California growers have had a long and varied experience with many failures, and when they finally began to place their walnuts on the market they were obliged to accept the humiliating price of from 3 to 6 cents a pound less than that paid for imported walnuts."

In Oregon the reverse is true. Our walnuts command a price above that paid for walnuts raised anywhere else. The size, cracking-out quant.i.ty, delicate flavor and delicious creamy taste, are the qualities that give the Oregon walnut its surpa.s.sing excellence. If we have this pre-eminence at the beginning of the industry, what may we expect when intelligent cultivation has produced the best grade of walnuts of which our soil and climate are capable?

To Oregon, then, with its vast areas adapted to this industry, must the world look for its great annual walnut harvest in the years to come. The far-seeing man will secure an interest in Oregon walnut lands now, before speculation and a general awakening to their real value have boosted the price to that of walnut lands elsewhere.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _View in Prince Walnut Grove Dundee, Oregon_]