Eric Wanderweg I would be interested in trying to start a few of those trees. I know there is a grove of Chestnuts not that far from where I live that is old growth.
Final reminder, if anyone wants to grow their own wild-type American chestnut trees, I have enough extra nuts to share. This is turning out to be another successful year. I’m collecting burs from many different trees in my area. I’m also harvesting Chinese chestnuts so if you’re looking for a mast crop for your deer plot, I can send you Chinese nuts too. Fully blight resistant and adaptable to many growing zones.
To complete this circle Eric Wanderweg was nice enough to send me some seed pods last fall. I followed the advice and threw seed into fridge over winter. Since my beautiful bride fell and broke her hand May 15, we had a raised garden spot empty so seeds got planted there to stop wild life from killing them. they are growing pics after I make them small enough
I will have to scan the article in the local paper I just got (cannot find article online), apparently there is a stand of 175 year old chestnut trees nearby on Old Mission Peninsula Will have to add planting some chestnuts to this fall's to-do list
Someday I’m going to have to take a pilgrimage to Michigan to see these for myself. I know there are several populations of healthy American chestnuts scattered across the state. As I understand it, it’s not because the chestnuts that are growing there have some kind of superior genetics. There is a naturally occurring pathogen in the environment in Michigan that weakens the blight fungus, slowing it down enough to where the chestnuts can wall off the infection before it girdles the trunk/limbs. Either way it’s great that small pockets of these trees are thriving out there in the wild, and not lost completely to history.
It’s hard to believe it’s been 5 years since I started this thread, and in that time not only found hundreds of these trees in my state, but have grown and planted them every year since 2022. Some years the trees that were previously making nuts die back to the root system, but I seem to always find new trees producing nuts somewhere else. I’m going to continue doing this for the foreseeable future too. So, starting around the 3rd week of September I’ll put out another reminder for anyone here interested in growing their own from seed. That’s when the burs will be ready to harvest. I’ve got my eyes on several different sources this year.
Beautiful. With any luck there’s another flowering chestnut close by (preferably American) that pollinated the nuts inside those burs.
Ahh, that is odd, I usually get the Ticker delivered daily to my email, not sure how I missed it. I found the article in print in the Elk Rapids News.
Chestnut harvest season is underway again. If you would like to grow your own wild type American chestnuts from seed, PM me for details
My nephew sent me this photo today, taken on a mountain in SW Virginia. He says there's "hundreds if not thousands" of chestnut shoots and young trees along the spine of this mountain, including one healthy-looking fourteen-inch-diameter one, but not a burr or nut in sight. I wonder if they didn't pollinate, or if the late frosts we had here killed this years' blooms?
Always nice to find some survivors out in the wild. It's not often I find them full of burs, unless they're alongside a road getting plenty of sun or in a forest where the canopy either died off or was clear cut recently. I don't know about Virginia but up here ours start to bloom in mid-late June on average.
