Interesting 
.
So they are monoecious (each individual has separate male and female flowers) and to boot, they are self sterile. This is very different from say, avocados which have imperfect bisexual flowers that are male or female in the morning and the opposite sex towards the evening and into the next day (A/B flowering).
Well – as much as I love chestnuts I don’t have enough space for two (even chinkapins), so I’ll turn my focus to Macadamia nut trees.
You can easily graft two varieties to one tree, but they are not small trees.
Insane mast from this year’s chestnut crop! This is just the first wave of windfalls from a few of the trees in one of the Foundation’s orchards. These are various Chinese/American hybrids. The lowest percentage of weevil losses I’ve ever seen is occuring this year. The chestnuts and hickories are particularly high-quality this season. And there’s so much more yet to fall…
Beautiful!
I had a single tree blooming behind the barn for 20 years, no other tree close enough, so blank nuts for 20 years. They are not self fruitfull…well, an occasional tree, like 1 percent of them, but, largely, self barren. There is a tree outside Harrow, Ontario, that sets nuts on its own pollen, but the seedlings grow slowly and the survival rate is not good past 5 years or so.
This year I had 3 trees blooming on the home place, and hand pollinated the one behind the barn…and am expecting a few nuts where I could reach burs to pollinate.
I’m in the Gulf of St Lawrence, so nutfall will be later here, sometime in October, going by last year.
One of my trees is from a very inbred seedlot, and is male barren, pure american, but doesn’t pop out many anthers, and the 3 or 4 anthers it does pop out have only set 2 nuts by hand pollination…no creamy dust on the fingers either from handling them.
The second tree from that seedlot had 3 catkins this year, all nice and fuzzy and shedding
Someone in zone 5 was asking about chestnuts for there…if you are coastal, get nuts from a coastal area, as inland seedlots here tend to wake up when it’s suddenly plus 5 to plus 8 in a January or Feb thaw, then, within 24 hours, it’s minus 15 to minus 25. (degrees C)
When that happens, they wake up, lose hardening and just never leaf in the spring.
I’m 5b/6a, depending on the year.
What are some things to do with chestnuts besides roast them? I can get a hold of some for the effort it requires to pick them up, but just end up giving them away. I’d be curious to see recipes for them.
They can be used much the same way potatoes or beans are used, and have been used that way in Italy and China for hundreds of years. And personally I prefer boiling Chinese chestnuts rather than roasting them. Boiling brings out more flavor and softens the texture.
for me a dessert of roasted chestnuts with home made fruit flavored mead is paradise. so the recipe is roast them and drink some fine, fruity alcoholic beverage with it. Fragolino wine from Italy (“Little Strawberry”, made with Concord type grapes) is also fabulous with chestnuts, as is a good Lambrusco or a Bonarda from Argentine (various types, some too dry, get it as sweet as possible). I do prefer flaky-textured, easy-peeling, sweet chestnuts of course.
I have been boiling them for the last 30 years. I loved the one that had some sweet juice near the center of the chestnut.
Tony
My wife and her family use chestnut flour to make a range of Italian cakes, breads, and in a soup. The first few times I tried them, I didn’t like them. Now they’re something I look forward to at this time of year
Yep. The chestnut flour fritters are really tasty (castagnaccio), but my liver hates them. As i have noted in another thread, chestnuts are amongst the healthiest carbohydrates you can find, it’s the fried oil that sets me back.
Try avocado oil.
Yes. I discovered it a year ago and it is incredible to taste it after a fry, it tastes exactly the same as raw. Now I am only using this for sauteing.
Have you noticed that the starchy chestnuts are not as sweet as the less starchy ones?
Tony
The starchy ones are European or American and they have low levels of sugar. The denser ones, the Japanese and Chinese, are less starchy and have higher sugar levels.
