Growing Nuts in the North A Personal Story of the Author's Experience of 33 Years with Nut Culture in Minnesota and Wisconsin — Background and Themes

A Hobby That Takes One Out-of-Doors

Weschcke presents his nut-growing as a hobby with practical and ornamental results far beyond his original conception. He associates working with trees with healthful thought and living, and with a closeness to nature and God. This philosophical framing is undercut by the detailed, often frustrating accounts that follow. The author’s voice shifts between the reflective and the procedural, as when he describes the need to join the Northern Nut Growers' Association and provides specific contact names—George L. Slate, Dr. H. L. Crane—and the history of the association’s founding. This blend of personal satisfaction and practical networking reveals a writer who values both inner reward and concrete support systems.

The Ordeal of Importing Polish Stock

One of the most vivid episodes concerns the importation of walnut and hazel material from Poland via Reverend Crath in 1936. Weschcke narrates a wearisome, exasperating experience: securing permits from the Bureau of Plant Industry, engaging a New York importing firm, and hiring brokers. The shipment arrived without an invoice, and the perishable material sat in harbor storage while he frantically sought a way through the red tape. He wrote to Clarence A. Reed, a government contact, and under heavy bond the material was released. The grafts suffered enormous mortality—of about four thousand English walnut grafts, only one hundred twenty-five took well. By the following spring only ten varieties survived. Weschcke’s account is precise about numbers and procedures, and his frustration is palpable without being melodramatic.

Testing Hardiness Through Loss

Weschcke’s narrative is built around measurable outcomes: of 12,000 seedling trees, more than 800 were tested for varietal classification and set out in test orchard formation on two locations, both high on a ravine slope. He notes that the walnuts planted showed a fairly high degree of hardiness, but cautions that the winter in question was not a severe test winter. The author’s willingness to report failure is a consistent feature: grafts blown out, winter injury, and the suggestion that remaining seedlings might be propagated in a warmer climate. This honesty gives the book its credibility. Weschcke does not claim universal methods; he records what worked and what did not under specific conditions, leaving the reader to weigh the evidence.

Diction of a Practical Pioneer

Weschcke’s language is direct and unadorned, favoring terms like wearisome, exasperating, frantic, and desperation when describing setbacks. He uses precise quantities—four thousand grafts, one hundred twenty-five survivors—and concrete verbs: planted, grafted, repacked, fumigated. His sentences are often long and packed with sequential detail, mirroring the layered complexity of the importation process. The voice is that of a man who has learned by doing and who expects his reader to do the same. He addresses the amateur horticulturist but does not condescend; the technical details are presented as necessary knowledge, not as obstacles. This diction, at once personal and instructional, defines the book’s character.

Weschcke’s narrative is best read as a case study in persistence rather than a definitive guide. Readers should pay attention to the specific conditions he describes—climate, soil, bureaucratic procedures—and treat his successes and failures as data points for their own experiments. The book rewards those who value firsthand testimony over generalized advice.

There’s something comforting in how Carl Weschcke’s years of patient setbacks never hardened into bitterness—just a quieter kind of knowing. I felt that same steady, unhurried wisdom in The English Husbandman (The Second Booke) — Text and Context, where old practicalities sit close to the soil, not far from it. Both feel like letters from a calmer time.