Giant Chestnuts

[ansayre]

How are you addressing the butternut canker disease. I fondly remember collecting butternuts with grandpa 50 years ago.

[steveb4]

far as i know, they were never native to here so maybe the canker isn’t present. same with chestnuts. if i could find a z4 hardy one it would probably survive as their traditional range ends in southern Maine, 400 mi. south of here.

[astrid]

Hey castanea,

Buzz Ferver just posted his available chestnut seedlings for spring 2024 shipping and I noticed a couple references to Nanking. Do these seedlings have parentage off of your Nanking Select tree?

Going to pick up a grafted Black Satin and a Jenny seedling. Are there anything else listed that looks particularly interesting?

[castanea]

They are not related to Nanjing Select.

Are you interested in grafted trees or seedlings?

[astrid]

Thanks for the heads up! I may have to ask Buzz where his NankingxMahogany came from:)

I’m planting seedlings about 10 feet apart and then plan to cut out the less good ones in a few years. Honestly 3-4 good Chinese chestnuts in 10 years will likely be plenty for me to eat and share. However, I do have a collecting instinct so my interests got piqued by the Jenny and Black Satin because I remember seeing really beautiful pictures of the nuts posted by you. Ditto your Nanking Select, which hopefully will make its way into nursery trade.

[castanea]

Nanking x Mahogany is seedling of Nanking with Mahogany as the pollen parent. It came from one of the Connecticut Ag Exp Station plantings. Seedlings of Nanking were widely planted in the 1950s and 1960s.

Check out his seedlings of Royalmark, a crenata/mollissima cross.

[astrid]

I planted a Royalmark this spring based on his description. Thanks for the seal of approval!

[astrid]

Ended up also picking up a grafted Yixian Orange and an AU Homestead seedling. Also eyeing the Route 9 seeds. I need to buy some land or befriend somebody with more land.

[JustPeachy]

@zendog

So, for example, I bought some Qing chestnuts, from a grower who has an orchard that is basically half Qing and half Eaton. Genetically, I assume an Eaton seed from the same orchard would have the same genetics, relatively speaking as a Qing seed. I say relatively, since obviously none will be the same either way, but basically I’m wondering if buying Eaton seeds from that seller be any different from buying Qing seeds since it is still the same “parents.”

This sounds like Winkel farms. Eaton is considered C. mollissima × C. crenata × C. dentata and Qing is usually described as C. mollissima and sometimes some part C. dentata.

Does it matter of it’s Eaton x Qing vs Qing x Eaton? Not really, but the problem is that often times you can only guarantee the mother and not the pollen donator. Even with hand pollination, there’s still the chance of stray pollen. In the large orchards that chestnut seeds get collected from, it’s almost never hand pollinated, so the Eaton x Qing could actually be Eaton x Mossberg even if the Qing was a closer pollen donator.

My buddy Buzz in VT lists chestnut seed based on most likely crosses, but there is nothing to say that it couldn’t be what I explained.

Let me give you another example, at HARC, they have PQK seed from the PQK orchard block. Now these are Peach Qing and Kohr planted next to each other. This seed is usually not sold (in fact it wasn’t last year). The Qing seed they actually ended up selling in 2022 was from a different block closer to other C. dentata.

This rarely rarely matters to anyone. It’s only if you have a very very particular goal in mind where this matters. I want 100% C. mollissima, more specifically I want Qing x Peach crosses, because there are aspects of other C. species that I do not like. I want Qing and x Peach because I like aspects of those two particular cultivars. I did not want PQK seed because of the chance of Kohr genetics. The difficulty of my request sans the ability to hand pollinate meant that I had to have Buzz set aside seed from a very particular orchard. It also meant I turned down early chances to buy seed from Red Fern, Winkel, Harc, etc…

If you have a very specific goal, there may be value in being patient to buy exactly what you want. Right now I have (I think) ~7 Qing x Peach seedlings in the greenhouse. Waiting for them to size up for another year before I plant them.

[zendog]

Thanks for the details @JustPeachy

@JustPeachy

This sounds like Winkel farms.

They actually came from Michael Parks, with an orchard that is primarily Qing and Eaton. He said some nuts may have come from Qing trees close enough to a Pandora for that to be the pollen source, but it seems like most should be QingXEaton, although it seems like mostly good trees and hopefully that will lead to good offspring. We will see.

I planted them in 3x6 air pruning bed and they are pretty close to hitting the top of the hardware cloth which is around 4 feet over the soil line.

I would like to get some Yixian large and Yixian good flavor nuts to grow out and maybe Yixian Orange as well. But I don’t see them offered for sale.

[JustPeachy]

@zendog

I planted them in 3x6 air pruning bed and they are pretty close to hitting the top of the hardware cloth which is around 4 feet over the soil line.

Looking good! My season is shorter so they haven’t grown as much.

[castanea]

In some years, the University of Missouri HARC program sells Yixian Large nuts.
No one sells Yixian Orange nuts yet. The HARC graft of it is only a year and a half old.

[astrid]

Given that I shelled out for a grafted Black Satin and a grafted Xixian Orange, hopefully I will have something to share/trade in a couple years.

Any thoughts on what I should pair them with for interesting progeny? It seems like a good possible pairing with Black Satin would be Lockwood or King Arthur or Little Giant to move towards breeding an XL quality nut to a smaller orchard tree. Or should I pair like with like and match to Emalyn’s Purple or Jenny or Qing to hope something better comes up?

Any ideas for Xixian Orange? Is it better to breed to Mossberger or Luvall’s Monster to get the looks/flavor to transfer to higher yield, bigger nut, better waterlogged/cold tolerance? Or something similar in nut size and taste like ABC red or Nanking Special or AU Homestead?

The thought is that I will probably have to (due to lack of space in my yard) foist one or both of these plants on my suburban 6b/7a dwelling friends/family. So there might be the opportunity to get some interesting breeding in. BTW, is it possible to successfully graft a pollinator branch onto a chestnut tree or is it all or nothing?

[hobilus]

@castanea

but it’s been growing in blighted areas for almost 10 years with no significant blight infections. This is a photo of Szego nuts -

amazing chestnuts! who can help but marvel at comically HUGE ones. I want some! I have several Qing seedlings coming along. Finally there are nuts on my Bouche de Betizac too, i noticed. Curious for your take on the matter of blight. I assume you have little to none. My observation of local dentatas is that they often tend to get about 10-12” dbh before showing significant blight. Ive heard (and it makes sense) that the fissures in mature bark allow to really get a foothold. Id imagine this amounts to 40 years or more in many cases.

[castanea]

There was no blight in California. Blight in the eastern US can vary from one place to another.
Now I’m in Missouri and blight here tends to wipe out American trees very quickly. Most European trees seem to be much more resistant to the blight we have here.

[castanea]

Crossing different cultivars is like gambling. You never know what traits will emerge in the seedlings but Qing does have a tendency to pass its sweetness on to many of its seedlings. It might be interesting to cross Yixian Orange (for flavor) with Qing (for sweetness).

Trying to breed smaller trees is probably not going to work well with most crosses because the only truly small tree genetics come from Little Giant and those genetics are going to be mostly washed out when crossed with larger trees. But Qing is not a big tree (pumila genetics), so a cross between Qing and Little Giant might be interesting.

Crossing Black Satin with Emalyn’s Purple might produce seedlings with large tasty nuts and an earlier drop date than Black Satin.

[astrid]

Thanks very much for the suggestions! Qing x XiXian Orange would be an interesting breeding combo indeed and Qing scions are easy to get from Red Fern Farm (lots of other tempting selections there).

I haven’t considered the nut drop time for Black Satin since mid October would be 3-4 weeks before my typical first frost. But if I was breeding for earliness, wouldn’t Jenny be better since it’s one of the earliest? Or is it because BS x EP are very similar, to ensure a good consistent progeny?

Thanks for suggesting Qing x LG. I really don’t have room in the yard, but maybe I could fit two trees in on the other end of my yard. I guess I could also hand pollinate to get some good crosses going (can I grow grafted trees close together and pruned down, if they’re intended for breeding rather than production? Or better just to graft them all to a frankentree?). Small trees with (ample but not overwhelming amount of) good nuts would make chestnuts more appealing to would be suburban orchardists. Could seedlings be rogued in the first two years to select for smaller size?

[castanea]

It’s not XiXian. It’s Yixian.

Yixian County, Yixian County Huangshan - Huangshan Travel Guide

If you were breeding for earliness, Jenny, Yixian Large and Emalyn’s Purple would be the best parents for big nuts that drop early. All three, plus Black Satin, have large tasty nuts. BS just drops later.
Seedling size in the first year or two doesn’t tell you how large the trees will be. Different trees will grow differently. Some emphasize putting in large root systems first so they may not be very tall the first few years.

[astrid]

my latent dyslexia catches up me (admittedly it got incepted by Perfect Circle’s misspelling).
Somehow I managed to do this despite spending several hours reading up on chestnuts varieties in the last few days. More embarrassing since I actually hiked Huangshan (okay, I took the cable car up) years ago though I never saw any chestnuts trees, just lots of tea plantations.Thanks for your patience with me.

Still curious about Emalyn’s Purple recommendation, since HARC CIN describes it as a mid season variety. Is there anything about it that suggests it would be a particularly good pairing with Black Satin? There’s not a lot of descriptions for the variety, though I imagine it must be superb considering the name.

Again, thanks so much for the information. Really wish I made an offer on that Acorn Deck House on 27 acres in 2020…

[castanea]

Emalyn’s Purple has produced some of the largest Chinese chestnuts I’ve ever seen in the US. Check out the middle nut in this photo. It’s huge-33 grams- or 13.7 nuts per lb. Average Chinese chestnuts in the US are 30-40 per lb.

Emalyn’s Purple is extremely vigorous. The growth you see in this photo occurred from April to July one year-

In case you can’t tell the size of those leaves, here’s one of them close up-

The original EP tree in California drops nuts early, a week to 10 days after Jenny (which is very early). The grafted tree at HARC drops them later than that, probably because of the rootstock and the different climate.
Nut flavor on EP is exceptional. It’s sweet with good flavor.
The reason to cross anything with BS is to get a BS seedling that drops nuts earlier. EP nuts are larger than BS. EP is more vigorous than BS. Nut quality between the two is similar but I would give the edge to EP.

Showing the purple better-