My plan was to post this picture today with a quote. I thought surely Laura Ingalls Wilder had written something about roasting chestnuts in her books but she did not.
So, instead I'll tell you a little about our American Chestnut trees.
The American Chestnut used to be a prominent tree in the eastern United States. They were all but elimated by the chestnut blight in the early 1900s. Typically new trees don't live long enough to flower and fruit. Several organizations have been trying to reintroduce blight resistant trees to the original growing range.
When we first bought our property more than twenty years ago we started planting trees from the soil conservation service. One year they offered American Chestnut seedlings. We bought a small bundle of those and two of them have grown to adulthood. For several years we have seen flowers and one had the prickly fruits grow on the trees. Previous years we have found lots of flat nuts. They were not fertilzed and did not grow into plump fruit.
Our two trees are not very close to each other so this spring when we noticed that the trees were flowering we clipped a flowering branch from one tree and tossed it into the tree that has had the prickly burs on it in the past.
Our experiment worked!
This year we have plump chestnuts!
Now we need to decide if we will roast them or plant them.
