Allegheny Chinquapins are easily distinguishable form chestnuts. The form is much more bushy, the nuts are tiny by comparison, and there is only 1 nut per husk.
Yes these trees grew in groves, the trees were not bigger than six or eight inches. But they were all killed by the blight, kind of sad that we lost this.
I planted a couple of the grafted Dunstons 23 years ago and have since planted several non-American types from Nolan. The smell is bad although I can’t say it brought to mind either cornbread or sex. I’ll try to remember to consider this description next spring to see if it fits. Since I’ve a poor memory for smells I shall have to arrange a comparison of the two in close sequence.
I considered it to be more of the decaying meat type odor that some pollination dependent plants exude including Asian pears. I have one overhanging my kitchen and it isn’t bad enough to affect the enjoyment of meals, even those not including cornbread (or sex).
The main function of the trees is to provide easy target shooting of squirrels, although I generally save enough to use in stuffing. I just shell and freeze them so they will taste fresh till thanksgiving.
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Your post left me with an album of mental images. The final one of which is a Thanksgiving table set around a main course of chestnut stuffed squirrels. If it were possible to post uplinks of mental images, most of the others would likely be classified as NSFW.
I doubt if I’ll ever look at chestnuts the same after reading this thread. They’re much more interesting and amusing now.
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if i’m ever in a room with chestnut pollen, cornbread, and alan…
If you’re collecting nuts from a mature tree that has been pretty much left alone for years, I would expect weevils in nearly every nut. That’s not really a problem if you collect them very regularly and process them promptly, but if you try to store them as is for hardly any time after they drop, I’d expect them to be almost all ruined. There’s information online, and I can probably find it for you if you can’t find it yourself, but I would recommend a very precise temperature – around 125 degrees but I can’t remember exactly, and I think it needs to be just right to be warm enough to kill the weevil eggs but not so hot as to start to cook the nuts – hot water bath of about 20 to 30 minutes. Curing makes a big difference in raw flavor, although I don’t know if it really matters if you’re planning to roast them. If I wanted to roast them all, I’d probably just roast them right away and freeze them.
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I was up in New Hampshire this weekend hiking in an area where I heard there was a stand of american chestnuts. Unfortunately I didn’t find any trees, but I did talk to someone at a private conservancy who had just ordered several trees from the American Chestnut Society. And I’m a big fan of what the ACS is doing, but I don’t understand why they’re crossbreeding with chinese chestnuts? If we have native trees that have survived and are blight resistant, why isn’t the ACS just using those in their breeding project? Why do they need to mix blight resistant chinese chestnuts to “recreate” the american chestnut if there already are american chestnuts that are resistant to blight? Why wouldn’t they just continue to develop and crossbreed the native trees?
I am no expert on this but I have read a little on it. My understanding was that surviving American chestnuts are suckers from blight damaged trees that also succumb to blight before they reach bearing age but are able to keep the roots alive to produce more suckers. That’s the way I understood it but I may be misinterpreting what they were trying to say.
Derby, I’m pretty sure American chestnuts can survive long enough to produce nuts, which isn’t long – chestnuts start producing quite young – and which is how folks are able to grow and sell American chestnut trees, even though they don’t survive very long.
My understanding is that the vast majority of remaining trees are suckering from trees that the blight killed back, but I also believe there are a few isolated or otherwise randomly surviving trees. I’m sure if there were a way to breed blight resistant trees from those survivors it would have been done. The ACF has continued to back-cross the blight resistant Chinese crosses to American chestnuts, selecting with each generation for trees that have retained the blight resistance, and I think they’re back to 31/32 pure American trees with resistance, maybe even better by now.
Interesting and you are no doubt correct , it had been some time ago I read about this subject. That is very close to a pure tree , maybe I should plant one at the cabin, I’m sure they, or a verity of them, grew there a hundred years ago.
I’ve seen chestnut trees growing from dead stumps that were bearing. That is a well known circumstance by the folks into preserving them. They have started replanting the resistant replacement but the old stumps may still manage to breed their own resistant strains.
I don’t understand why people here want to grow american chestnut. For me, Chinese chestnut tastes way sweeter and way easier to remove the skin. I know a Chinese chestnut farm in Ohio sold out Chinese chestnut in few weeks. I don’t have large enough land, If I had, I would grow few thousands of Chinese chestnut trees and sale the nut. It is relatively easy to take care of the trees and does not require a lot of fancy equipment to run the collecting and sorting process. I mail order it and pay about $ 4 a pound.
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What type of chestnut is the ‘Maron’ they grow in France? Is that a Chinese chestnut as well?
@Ampersand, I can offer you a technique that I use every year with great success. If you can get douglas fir shavings (one that has no chemical added, I have no luck finding this. So the next best thing is get oak pellets, the ones you get to smoke meat in your BBQ, I got mine from Traeger grills. Then you hydrate them and once the pellets expand and cool down you scoop the damp hydrated oak pellets and put your chestnuts in the veggie compartment with. You may want to layer as it can get quite hard to mix the chestnuts with the oak dust. Make sure all your chestnuts are covered and ensure that the saw dust remains damp at all times. If they dry out, just spray mist with some water. I have bought firm chestnuts in Dec and successfully store the chestnuts till May!!! Also before I do store the chestnuts this way, I wash them several times and then make squirt some diluted bleach into the water and then quickly take the nuts out (do not leave it to soak) If you want to make chestnut soups, then after washing your chestnut simply put them into ziplock bags and freeze. Note: do not vacuum pack your fresh chestnuts! You can get botulism from it. If you do not have too many chestnuts, press each one with your fingers, if they are firm then, they are usually good 
HTH
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I have a Dunstan chestnut variety (mostly American DNA) that peels quite easily and some other grafted Chinese varieties. The Chinese varieties are actually superior in flavor because of the mentioned sweetness, but when you are using them mixed with other foods there isn’t much difference. For an ingredient in stuffing it certainly makes little difference to me.
The Chinese varieties seem less vigorous and I’ve been waiting over 15 years to get a really nice crop from any of the 3 varieties growing on my property- but then, they are planted right next to established forest trees plus they got butchered by a freak Oct snowstorm 3 years ago. Meanwhile, I’m enjoying roasted Dunstons and they are as good as the kinds usually sold in stores. The tree started giving me nuts 5 years after being planted.
This was the 8th growing season from the two Chinese chestnuts I planted as pencil-size seedlings, and it looks like I’m going to get a couple gallons of nuts altogether, mostly from the tree I didn’t prune as hard.
I have only tasted the Chinese chestnut so I have nothing to compare it with. As I’m sure you already know the effort going into reestablishing the American varieties has been a long term effort of selecting plants with the blight resistant gene from the Chinese chestnut and saving as much of the american chestnut characteristics as possible in each generation. Aside from our consumption it is my understanding from reading that the American chestnut is a rapid growing tall tree that was able to compete well with our native forest trees. It’s prolific nut production provided abundant wildlife food. And an additional bonus was that the wood was pest resistant. Of coarse all this information is just from reading and not from any actual experience. Bill
ACF is the best-known organization, with the most $$$, and will probably achieve the ‘mostly’ American blight-resistant chestnut within a reasonable timeframe.
The American Chestnut Cooperators’ Foundation, headquartered at VA Tech, is laboring to produce a pure American by utilizing only American chestnuts which have displayed blight resistance in their breeding program. ACCF also has an ongoing program to help preserve remaining stump sprouts in C.dentata’s native range, by keeping competing trees from overtopping those surviving sprouts - which, as has been previously stated, do often reach bearing age before they are killed back to ground level and have to start over.
Though some folks will eschew it, SUNY has developed some transgenic American chestnuts that are resistant to blight, by inserting a gene from wheat, which codes for an enzyme which oxidizes oxalic acid, the compound produced by the blight fungus which kills chestnut cambium tissue.
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You’re correct, Bill.
American chestnut was an upright, rapidly-growing ‘timber’ type tree, as opposed to the more spreading ‘orchard’ type growth habit of the Chinese/Japanese/Korean types.
That said, I have a friend who has been active in the ACF for a couple of decades, and he’s indicated that the timber-type growth habit is dominant, with even most F1 crosses between American & Chinese exhibiting that upright central leader growth habit.
I’ve also never tasted pure American chestnuts… but all I’ve read suggests that the nuts are ‘sweeter’ than the Chinese…but one has to wonder… is that a nostalgic reminiscence, or reality?
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I wouldn’t want a chestnut sweeter than the Chinese here.