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 had there grafted the pistache trees and were establishing valuable orchards before the desolations of World War I.

The pistache tree has two habits that are rather discouraging to the commercial planter. Mr. Isley reports that his orchard of seedling trees grafted in place required fifteen years of cultivation before producing commercial crops. This was on land good for grapes and wheat but subject to the very dry summer of the Mediterranean climate. The pistache also has very irregular bearing habits. Mr. Isley states that in his Turkish pistache country the trees will be loaded with fruit once in five, six, or seven years. In other years the trees commonly set full crops, but the nuts drop off. In view of the fact that the trees are male and female, it is perhaps possible that the dropping could be overcome if the planters were to provide pollen-bearing insects to fertilize the trees.

My own observation and my interviews with pistache growers on the rocky lava slopes of Mt. Etna in Sicily confirm Mr. Isley's Turkish data in every respect—wild trees in rough places; grafting to improve strains; spasmodic bearing with rarely a heavy crop—but high prices. This rare fruiting should not be accepted as final.

Fortunately the nuts keep well—so well, in fact, that in Turkey before World War I the Ottoman Bank would lend heavily on bags of pistache nuts.

Dr. Robert T. Morris, in his book on nut growing, makes some statements that give one a shock. For example, he says that research has led him to place the nuts in the pine cones near the head of the list of nut food for human use. He thinks that even now, pine nuts are second only to the coconut.

This statement is open to question, because it is difficult to estimate the amount of crops that are little used in trade and that are chiefly consumed where produced, while no statistical record exists for them. To strengthen his conclusion, Dr. Morris states: