Growing Chestnuts In the Midwest- a very brief overview

 

Location Requirements

              Well drained Soil

              5.5-6.5 ph

              Avoid areas too steep to mow, north facing frost pockets, exposure to chemical drift

Pick somewhere you’re pretty sure you’ll around for awhile or at least someone interested in chestnuts will be

 Ground cover

              If currently in hay or pasture- cheapest to keep what you’ve got

If bare ground- plant a perennial cover like clover, short vetch, bluegrass- do your own research here based on what your goals are like if you want to make hay or graze or mow the whole thing.

Spacing

 20x20 feet or 108 trees/acre is what you see here (mostly)

 Wider rows allow for easier haying, grazing, cropping in between rows

 Closer spacing gets you a bigger crop earlier and requires more thinning later

20x20 (or 108 tree/acre) will require thinning down to 60-70 trees/acre by year 15. Crowded trees produce smaller and less nuts

Genetics

Chestnuts grow more true-to-type then most other tree crops so growing seedling (not grafted trees) is recommended- grafted chestnuts don’t last as long as seedling and are much more costly to establish.

 Chinese Chestnut are resistant to chestnut blight. Hybrid chestnut trees with some American or Japanese genetics might have some beneficial traits and also might be susceptible to blight.

 

Establishment

Provide your trees with a 3x3 weed free area, this can be accomplished with landscape cloth or herbicides and wood mulch. Don’t use pre-emergent on a tree in it’s first year.

Planting options: Potted, Bareroot, Direct seed

Potted: plant mid summer/July-August. Reduced transplant shock, good success rates, can’t usually get potted trees shipped to you, easier to plant then bareroot. Mulching reduces watering requirements

Bareroot: the old standard. Plant early spring. Trees can be acquired cheaply and shipped. Planting is more labor intensive. Somewhat lower success rate then potted. More water required during planting.

Direct Seed: Cheap. Fast. Early spring. Highest failure and replant rate. You have to protect the nut or something will come along and eat every single one.

Deer and Other animals

An unprotected chestnut tree is not a chestnut tree for very long. Tubes or a really good fence can protect from deer. Wood mulch will usually stop a raccoon from digging up a newly planted tree. A deer fence does not stop rabbits and other smaller critters but a tube does. Tree tubes act like Japanese Beetle traps and they will eat the entire tree in a day (can be prevented mechanically or chemically).

Mud daubers build nests in tree tubes. Voles and mice might winter in the tube and girdle the tree.

Deer are still able to do damage to a tree in a 5ft tube, but the damage is often less detrimental.

Fertilizer

 A lot of people don’t fertilize their chestnuts and they seem to do okay.

I use the University of Michigan’s recommendations found here: https://www.canr.msu.edu/chestnuts/horticultural_care/nutrient-management and I use a lot less then they recommend.

Chestnut really like nitrogen. Manure fertilizers can be useful.

Boron is the most important nutrient for chestnuts after NPK.

Tube Care

You’ll need to weed inside the tube. Every winter all the dead leaves need to be physically removed from the tube, I also prune side branches at this time for one straight leader growing the length of the tube.

Pruning

 Prune for a tree shape. Some chestnuts really want to be bushes. You’ll want to prune to manage 45 degree branch angles with “bad crotches”. These will brake on their own and take out the entire tree top. When you get into production you’ll want to prune/cull away poor producing trees that are in the way of good producing trees.

 

Harvest

Starting Mid-September through October, the spikey burrs open on the tree and drop the nut to the ground. Ground cover needs to be mowed short. Nuts need picked up daily or they will be eaten by wildlife. Nut wizards are useful tools. Mechanical harvesting is under development. Many hands are needed during harvest. You can involve your children, neighbors, local athletic teams, church groups, or your customers by utilizing a you-pick.

Chestnuts need kept in a cooler or fridge to maintain freshness.

Production

If you have good soil, good genetics, decent climate and provide excellent care, you might have around 10lbs nuts/tree at year 10 and 30-50lbs nuts/tree by year 20.  This equates to 1000-3,500 lbs/ acres between year 10 and 30.

Marketing

              Some options for selling your chestnuts are:

                             -Prairie Grove Chestnut Coop

                             -Direct to Customer through U-pick or direct sales through facebook or etsy

                             -To a grocery store or at a farmers market

                             -Online sales through a website and provide shipping  

 

Resources:

Red Fern Farm’s “Chestnut Primer”

Chestnut Growers of America

University of Missouri Center for Agroforestry

Trees Forever

Savannah Institute

NRCS and Web Soil Survey