Chestnut trees coming soon!

[wetdog1911]

Chestnut Hill Nurserys will soon be delivering young Chestnut trees (2-3 years old), to selected Wal Marts, Rural King and some Co-Op stores, east of the Mississippi.

These are grown from seed, not clones and breed easily (you will need 2 as they don't self propagate.

The trees were pretty much wiped out in the 1920s from infected Chinese trees being brought into the country. Estimated 2-3 Billion trees died, along with a huge forest food source and timber source.

I'm going to try some seeds this year that I collected last year and have been in the fridge since Dec. They do need that cold stratification(?) to germinate, like acorns.

Check out Chestnut Hill Nurserys for tons of information on locations, dates, growing and care.

They are really an amazing tree.

Rob

 

[Onomea]

Very cool. Glad to hear it!

 

[les.b]

When I was a kid, my dad showed me a stump on our property that had been a huge chestnut tree, which died in the blight. the stump measured feet across, I wish I had made a notation then, because it is long gone. A local bank was giving away seeds when I was about 10 or 12. I put them in a box with some dirt, and we were moving to a property that I still own. When we moved there, I just planted the whole box!!! Dumb kid. But... there are still two trees growing that produce chestnuts every year!!

Best Regards, Les

 

[delcrossv]

Some good news for a change!

 

[glowe]

In one lower Michigan rural area, where I grew up, there were still a few Chestnut trees in area fields. I suppose far enough away from others to survive into the late 1950s and my father used to pick chestnuts and roast them. I never cared for roasted Chestnuts. The American Chestnut is much like the American Elm, eventually the disease got almost all of them as well. I still see Elms in the Upper Peninsula, but they are dying up here now. A quick synopsis I find interesting about the tree.

More than a century ago, nearly four billion American chestnut trees were growing in the eastern U.S. They were among the largest, tallest, and fastest-growing trees. The wood was rot-resistant, straight-grained, and suitable for furniture, fencing, and building. The nuts fed billions of wildlife, people and their livestock. It was almost a perfect tree, that is, until a blight fungus killed it more than a century ago. The chestnut blight has been called the greatest ecological disaster to strike the world's forests in all of history.

The American chestnut tree survived all adversaries for 40 million years, then disappeared within 40.

Many of us learned the great Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem The Village Blacksmith in school, which begins:

UNDER a spreading chestnut tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.

Th Chestnut tree brings back fond memories as a great place to eat lunch in the shade while hoeing beans when I was a child at my grandfather's farm. One lone one stood in the middle of a 40 acre field until the 1960s before it finally died.

 

[Targets Guy]

Beautiful tree. That was the first poem I memorized as a toddler.

 

[BAM-BAM]

The emerald ash borer from eastern Asia has pretty much killed off all the Ash trees in our area...... and 21 other states.

 

[remshooter]

Chestnut Hill Nurserys will soon be delivering young Chestnut trees (2-3 years old), to selected Wal Marts, Rural King and some Co-Op stores, east of the Mississippi.

These are grown from seed, not clones and breed easily (you will need 2 as they don't self propagate.

The trees were pretty much wiped out in the 1920s from infected Chinese trees being brought into the country. Estimated 2-3 Billion trees died, along with a huge forest food source and timber source.

I'm going to try some seeds this year that I collected last year and have been in the fridge since Dec. They do need that cold stratification(?) to germinate, like acorns.

Check out Chestnut Hill Nurserys for tons of information on locations, dates, growing and care.

They are really an amazing tree.

Rob

CHINA... the gift that keeps on giving ,...infections ,..and other things

 

[Rustyt1953]

As a lad I got pretty good at playing "Conkers" using Horse Chestnuts.

The trick was to crack your opponents conker and not your own knuckles.

 

[Ivan the Butcher]

The emerald ash borer from eastern Asia has pretty much killed off all the Ash trees in our area...... and 21 other states.

Ohio has lost its Elm, Ash, and Chestnut to foreign blights. I guess we lost our steel mills that way too!

Ivan

 

[DGNY]

Thanks, love those chestnuts! Planted two Chinese chestnut trees in my second house about 50 years ago, don't know if they're still bearing.

Such a treat each autumn for many of us, either locally grown or imported -many of the latter have turned bad, tho.

 

[BigBill]

I need nut trees as well as more apple trees for the animals. We feed the wildlife all winter.

 

[GypsmJim]

About 30 years ago I responded to an ad from the American Chestnut Foundation. They were selling seedlings. As I recall, they were from one of the few blight resistant forests in the US. We planted a dozen (that was the limit) very carefully on our rural mountaintop amid oaks, spruce, pines, maples and Aspens that grew there naturally. We even flagged them so we could track their progress.

The Winter before my son had planted horse chestnut seeds in pots. When we did they transplanting they were put in a known spot and tracked as well.

It all ended in 2 years. The deer ate all of the American Chestnuts, even though some pretty good looking forage was only a foot away. My son's plantings were in a clearing and the next Spring we found that a snowmobile had mowed them all down, red flags and all.

I can't fault the deer, but if you ever want to come on my property with a motorized vehicle, don't ask me why I won't give you permission.

 

[GypsmJim]

As a lad I got pretty good at playing "Conkers" using Horse Chestnuts.

The trick was to crack your opponents conker and not your own knuckles.

The kids just don't know how to have fun these days. I never heard the term conkers, but if you beat your opponent your chestnut became a "1 Kinger". Each successive won battle and the number went up. I distinctly remember personally having a 30 kinger.

But, you might say we cheated - but so did everybody else. We used last year's chestnuts (they got really hard), plus we dipped them in varnish to harden them even more.

Ah, the good old days.

 

[Rustyt1953]

The Brits call it "conkers".

Yanks call it "kingers".

 

[lihpster]

Had some of those as a kid that were store bought and made from some type of plastic. Harder than hell. Didn't break, just ricocheted off and came back to hit you. Hard. When they did break they threw pieces of plastic like shrapnel. Dangerous. Fun, but dangerous. I think the lawn darts were safer.

 

[Peak53]

So, are these new chestnuts vaccinated against the blight? I hope so. What a recovery this could be. Unfortunately, there are no hardwoods in my neck of the woods. We have all the lodgepole me and mother nature can burn in this lifetime. But, I would love to see the original hardwoods recover if they can.

 

[Rustyt1953]

We called 'em Super Knockers.

 

[jrm53]

I set out two chinese chestnuts a few years ago and they are bearing good I used to eat them but now the deer eat them like candy and clean them all up. Jeff

 

[lihpster]

We called 'em Super Knockers.

That's the ones. Mine were green. I always wanted my brother's since he got the red.