Eric, this thread really got my blood flowing. We have three fully mature chestnuts in our yard, I'm relatively certain these were planted trees, not American. That said, I'm starting to find saplings around, in places the deer can't get. We get thousands of nuts from them annually. I'm going to follow your lead and start a little chestnut plantation inside the electric fence next year. I tried this about 20 years ago with chestnut oaks. I was thrilled to see about 300 saplings start growing. About three weeks after the sprouting, the squirrels discovered all the little flags marking buried malted chestnuts, and wiped me out before I even knew it was happening. Keep up the enthusiasm, absolutely fantastic!
I’m glad you found it entertaining/inspiring It’s been quite a journey on my end. From the first time I found a true surviving American chestnut, then more and more, to harvesting the nuts, stratifying and planting them, etc. I still find and document as many of these trees as I can. Even if what you have are Asian trees, that’s great if you can propagate them. They’re an excellent source of food for wildlife and people alike. Good luck and thanks again.
I was hoping to do this while they were still dormant, but this week’s heat wave threw a wrench into the mix. These are the rest of my pure American seedlings that I’m going to find homes for. I’m done with the foundation for good now. The CT chapter of TACF has once again left me hanging concerning their orchards so I’m going to do some rogue planting in various forest edges locally. I’d like to do it each year from now on, if I can keep harvesting nuts every fall from surviving trees.
Here’s something out of the ordinary. While hiking a ridge this morning looking for blueberries with my son, I passed through a large grove of surviving American chestnut sprouts. I’ve collected burs there a couple years ago with the American Chestnut Foundation. On the way out, right in the middle of the trail I found a brand new seedling. Pretty remarkable that a squirrel buried the nut and it actually sprouted on its own. These trees have been considered functionally extinct here in Connecticut since around 1910 or so. I have 3 other American trees I planted last year on the other side of the yard, so I found a spot along the edge of the woods for this one. Hopefully in a few years they can all cross pollinate and I can plant even more.
Keeping thread alive. We found another chestnut on the tree farm but it was dead and the logging crew dropped it as a courtesy. Brother is heading down with equipment and is going to ask the loggers to put the trunk onto the trailer so we can have it milled. willprovid updates
Very nice, looking forward to pictures of the milled chestnut I looked back at pictures of the tree you posted, and I believe that to be a variety of Chinese chestnut, definitely not chinquapin or American chestnut. There were many different cultivars that were brought over here, some for timber form, some for nut size/production, some just as dwarf-sized yard trees.
Eric Wanderweg , yes the forester thinks the chestnuts on put place were likely planted by my grandfather. A forester at the beginning of the science. Opinion “the goo goo days” as Whitcomb Riley would say.
I just pulled this year’s batch of Chinese chestnuts out of the raised bed. The top 1” of soil was frozen so I had to use a garden hose to thaw it out. They all came out without incident though. I’m bringing these to work today. A coworker of mine and his father have a 50 acre lot they hunt deer on. They recently cleared one of the overgrown fields and are practically foaming at the mouth to get these planted there as a food plot for the deer. I’m glad they’ll go to good use
Being Chinese trees they'll have no issues with blight anyway. The big thing will be deer browse, so I instructed my coworkers to put cages around them right away, and put 4' high tree tubes on them in the spring. Deer love to nail young chestnuts. These I grew from seeds I gathered in the 2022 season, which was brutally dry. I didn't collect any American seeds that year, only Chinese ones from a couple roadside trees I found.
I recently found this roadside tree that made it to a few inches in diameter before blight killed the main stem. Today I harvested the dead trunk. The smaller sections will be used as runners to stack firewood on, since they’re rot resistant. The larger pieces I’ll do a little table saw milling with.
Kind of a sad day here. I was driving by the very first roadside grove of surviving American chestnut trees I found back in June 2021. The power company came through and cut them all down to the ground this week. I knew it was only a matter of time before it happened, but it’s still a bummer. At least we gathered nuts from this location for the past 3 years, and the progeny are growing in CT TACF germplasm conservation orchards. I gathered up whatever oddball lengths of chestnut wood I could find, to save for table saw milling. The one upside is that while I was assessing the damage, I found a large (for American chestnut) living tree further into the woods that is reaching the canopy and looks like it’s producing burs. The trunk is heavily cankered which suggests the tree is working hard to fight the blight infection. It could have some natural resistance, which would be great. Nice specimen to keep an eye on, and it would make a great “mother tree” to grow nuts from if I can beat the squirrels to them.
It’s that time of year again. I’ve been making the rounds collecting American chestnut burs from various spots I found. Many are donated to the CT chapter of TACF, and the rest I’m growing or sending out to people that want to grow them. A few of these nuts came from a tree that I know was pollinated by a nearby Chinese chestnut, so the offspring will be a hybrid tree. The plan with the hybrids is to plant them in my own yard as an ornamental/food tree. Whatever I grow next year that doesn’t get planted in my yard will be “rogue planted” out in the wild locally, in the spring of 2026. This year I ordered some Allegheny Chinquapin nuts to grow too. I’ll plant them in the woods behind my house. Hard to believe how tiny they are. Here’s a comparison between the chinquapins and an American chestnut:
