My hybrid chestnuts are growing like gangbusters!

[NickB79]

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151092156886847&set=a.10150438604701847.357661.574696846&type=1&theater

If I had the money, I'd buy 5 acres of farmland from the farmer behind us and start my own private arboretum.

Now to see who will survive our Minnesota winter, save the best 6-7 for myself and give away the rest for wildlife habitat and nut production to friends, family, coworkers and neighbors.

Then, order even more seeds and do it all over again!

[madrchsod]

1. looking good!

chestnut trees are a thing of the past around my town...

[NickB79]

2. Yeah, the blight really did a number, so these are resistant hybrids

I'd never even seen a chestnut tree until I found two purebred American chestnuts at the MN Landscape Arboretum. As I researched them more, they quickly became my favorite plant. You can get more calories per acre with chestnuts than corn, and the nuts are more nutritious than corn as well. A tree can live for centuries with proper care, and their deep roots can shrug off droughts that would wipe out other crops. Plus, they bear heavy crops annually, unlike many other nut and fruit trees. At one point, there were more chestnut trees east of the Mississippi than any other tree, even outnumbering oaks and maples.

In my dreams, we'd start planting these and other species as permaculture to supply food and wildlife habitat instead of the water and fertilizer hungry GMO annual crops we currently base our food supply on. But in the meantime, I can grow and give away hundreds of trees a year for under $50 to get a pocket of growth started in my area.

[LWolf]

4. A question:

Hybrids don't breed true, correct?

Is there a future outside of controlled propagation for wild chestnut trees that naturally reproduce in forests?

[NickB79]

7. You can breed hybrids into a fairly stable strain given enough time

For example, that's what the American Chestnut Foundation is doing through backcrossing: http://www.acf.org/r_r.php

Although the Chinese genes for resistance are only incompletely dominant, they nonetheless usually express themselves clearly when present in seedlings purposely inoculated with a virulent form of the blight fungus. And that is how each backcross generation is tested - by inoculation with blight. Only those seedlings that show the greatest resistance are used for further backcrossing to an American parent.

But every backcross, although necessary to recover desirable American traits, also reintroduces the genes for blight susceptibility from the American parent. In order to remove those genes, the next steps at TACF are intercrosses. In the first intercross, the most blight-resistant 15/16ths American trees are crossed with other blight-resistant 15/16ths American trees. Again, only resistant seedlings are saved.

At the first intercross, it may prove difficult to select inoculated seedlings which have only inherited genes for blight resistance from their Chinese ancestor and no genes for blight susceptibility from their American ancestors. Testing in subsequent generations or a test cross back to an American parent will confirm that first intercross trees contain only the Chinese genes for resistance. Most or all the progeny of parents containing only genes for blight resistance should show blight resistance, whereas some progeny of parents with genes for susceptibility should show susceptibility to blight.

When crossed with each other, these highly blight-resistant parents will breed true for resistance, since they will have no American genes for susceptibility to blight. This second intercross will yield nuts for restoration.

These seedlings are even trickier, since their parents were already multi-species hybrids of American, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean chestnuts that all cross-pollinated in the orchard of the nursery I bought their seed from. So, technically they're hybrids of hybrids of hybrids! Since I'm more interested in producing trees for nuts under cultivation, I don't need as much American genetics in my trees. It's really only needed up here for cold hardiness; Asian chestnut species have a hard time coping with -30F winters that American chestnuts shrug off. I'll just weed out any that are runty or get cut back by winter cold, and keep the most vigorous 6-7 for my yard. They should fruit on their own within 5-8 years, at which point I'll grow out those nuts, and so on and so forth. If chestnut blight finds my little patch, all the better because it would help weed out the ones that aren't resistant enough.

It sounds crazy to most people, but I think it's great fun!

[LWolf]

10. I think it's a wonderful effort.

Especially if there is some chance of reproductive viability down the road.

[hunter]

5. The first peoples of the Americas treated the forests as a giant garden.

They encouraged the growth of chestnuts and other edible nut tree species in eastern North America, and oaks and pine nut species in the West.

The "wilderness" Europeans encountered wasn't all that wild.

[NickB79]

6. Indeed. It was the largest permaculture experiment ever done

At it's height, it's estimated there were 100 MILLION Native Americans living in the Americas. The lands supplied a massive bounty while still leaving room for wildlife, and none of it required the widespread use of pesticides, herbicides, artificial fertilizers, massive factory farms, GM crops, and fossil fuel inputs to do so.

I have a feeling we need to learn from and emulate their ways if we hope to survive the coming century of global warming and Peak Oil. Thus, I am trying to do my small part and put my green thumb to work, growing and distributing as many edible plants as possible in my community.

[TlalocW]

3. It would be cooler if they were growing like Ghostbusters

Just sayin'.

TlalocW

[Kablooie]

8. I don't know that I'd want gangbusters all over my yard.

[Denninmi]

9. Some advice for the OP - watch out for woodchucks, deer, rabbits, and voles.

I had a devil of a time getting my chestnuts going, they were repeatedly damaged by animals. I lost the top growth for the first three seasons on many of them to various chewing animals. They would strip the growth in the summer, and girdle or just plain eat the wood in the winter. I finally had to enclose them in hardware cloth cylinders surrounded by a larger cylinder of welded fence wire. I left those on until the trees were about 2 inches in diameter and about 8-10 feet tall. Good thing chestnuts are tough and capable of regenerating well from the roots and trunk.