Thanks for the advice. I thought I might move the tiny Marigoule, hoping that it will still grow. I have a spot for it. It does have bigger leaves compared to the other two, which is interesting. I live in WA state, so getting some from Washington Chestnuts might be an option.
Edit: I checked the Washington Chestnuts site again. This is part of how they describe Precose Migoule: "Nut production is good to excellent of large chestnuts that fall free of the burr starting at the age of 3-5 years. … Nut fall is usually mid to late September and continuing until the first week into October. Nut quality is very good with this chestnut being consistently selected as the best tasting chestnuts in taste tests. " Maybe there is a regional difference? I don’t mind that it potentially grows so large, because I want that spot to be sort of a forest- like area anyway. It would be 25 feet from the Marivale, and I thought they could exchange pollen readily. Szego does sound tempting, but I didn’t want to confuse things by adding a mollissima hybrid. I’ll look up the others that you mentioned, thanks again.
Many chestnuts will not show much appreciable growth the year after being transplanted because they will prioritize growing the root system. When you grow seedling American chestnuts they will often show very little growth the first year either. You shouldn’t judge either seedlings or transplants on their first year’s growth.
Gillet nuts from a one year old graft-
Bergantz nuts-
Schlarbaum nuts-
Szego nuts-
It was from Edible landscaping and I bought them in 1997 or 1998. I do know it was a Chinese American hybrid. sorry, that is as far as I know. I was pleasantly surprised at the flaky texture and sweet taste of these small, light colored chestnuts.
Of these big ones, Szego is a really nice Chinese type nut. Bergantz is a really nice European type nut. Chinese types are denser and should be cooked differently, slower and at lower temperatures, than the European types. Gillet is a good European type with sweetness but doesn’t have quite as much flavor as Bergantz. Schlarbaum is a Chinese type nut. It needs a little more flavor and a little more sweetness.
Here are my Allegheny chinkapins today. I fear they will not ripen in time. They get a lot of sunlight, but perhaps still not enough. Nevertheless, I think the burrs look handsome.
Pretty much anything if you have well drained acidic soil - Chinese, American, European, or Japanese. They require very little chill. There are Chinese chestnut trees growing in Hawaii. They just don’t usually set nuts.
If u have enough space left, then plant one with as much American genes as you can. Their nuts are small but taste the best imo. The American trees get HUGE. They were once called the Redwoods of the East. Sadly, 90% of them east of the Rockies were killed by blight. Transplants west of the Rockies survive-- no blight there. Source your trees from west coast locations. Nuts planted in sunny loose amended soil grow at astonishing rates. After a good start, the roots eventually strengthen and will bunker buster down through just about any soil. Phytophora cinammon root rot is their only other achilles heel. The trees can produce thousands of nutritious nuts. There were whole regional economies back east in Appalachia that were turned to ghost towns when the blight came. Hillbillies used to ship millions of chestnuts by rail to the big cities - an enormous cash crop - and subsisted on the leftovers, stuffing the nuts into burlap sacks and storing them in cabin attics through the winter. The nuts taste like a cross between CORN and an almond. They are loaded with CARBS in addition to oily fatty proteins unlike other nuts. The loss of the Amer chestnut back east to blight is arguably the single greatest ecological disaster to ever befall us, and most Americans know nothing about its history, or what they’ve lost.
Apparently, there are huge surviving trees on islands in the Pac Northwest, and elsewhere in the west.
The Chinese species is more resistant to the blight, but their larger nuts taste inferior to me.
P.S. They like acid soil. Amend the topsoil or bed with peat, perlite, pine fines, and loam. Hit them with dilluted Miracid a few times in early summer. Keep well watered and caged against varmints the first few years until established. Use soil acidifier if necessary. They can easily grow 4 to 8 feet in a year if they’re happy. They are shade tolerant, but grow very slowly in the shade. They bolt in the sun.
TACF is trying to back-cross breed a chestnut to be 95% American and 5% Chinese to obtain reliable blight resistance from China but have a tall-timber American tree for all other intents and purposes. I am helping the TACF Maryland chapter in this effort. I have two “Restoration 1.0” trees planted from seed on my property. They are the result of decades of breeding and are thought to have robust disease-resistant genes that can be passed down through normal sexual reproduction, bringing the tree back from the brink of functional extinction back East.
If space is an issue, then consider Allegheny chinkapins instead. Similar animal, just bushier and shorter in stature.
