Chestnut: ExJ Seedling - Potted

Chestnuts were once a crucial staple crop in many parts of North America, Europe, and Asia, and they are enjoying a resurgence. Nuts can be roasted, boiled, or dried and milled into a flour. Chestnut trees are low-maintenance, productive, and tolerant of drought and sandy/rocky soils. Spiky shells deter squirrels from getting to nuts before you do.

This is a seedling from an orchard growing primarily grafted cultivars of European/Japanese crosses, with some pure European trees. That means the genetics of these trees are most likely a mix of European (Castanea sativa) and Japanese chestnut (Castanea crenata) (ExJ). We roasted and ate the nuts that we didn't plant, and they were delicious and easy to peel!

While Chinese chestnuts (Castanea mollissima) are grown in many areas of North America, they don't do well in the cooler summers of the Pacific Northwest, and we wouldn't recommend them for this region.

Planting: Chestnuts prefer well-drained, slightly acidic, sandy loam soil. They are intolerant of clay or wet soils. They are wind-pollinated so they require at least two to make nuts. Planting several in the same area helps to ensure adequate pollination. Requires watering for the first few years while they're getting established. Best planted when dormant (Nov-Mar) but can be planted later in spring.

Why seedlings? Growing seedlings from orchard cultivars helps maintain diversity (each seed is a new variety) while drawing on some of the best genetics for chestnuts in our bioregion. In other words, by planting and growing out these trees, you are participating in the breeding new, regionally-adapted chestnut varieties! The parents of these seedlings were selected for good production, large nuts, sweetness, precocity (producing nuts early in life), minimal cracking, and minimal pellicle intrusion (easy peeling). This means they are excellent stock for breeding new varieties of high-quality chestnuts. We recommend planting several of these trees closer together and selecting your final tree once they've produced their first nuts (3-5 years) so that you can select the most productive trees with the highest-quality nuts. Recommended final spacing is ~25' between the centre of each tree.

Why potted? If you won't be planting your trees right away and you don't feel sure about storing bare root trees then you want potted trees.  Potted trees will allow you more flexibility with transplanting timelines and late spring installations, however, they are more expensive to produce and to ship.

Our nuts are grown in tree pots, which are designed with a large opening at the bottom to air prune the root. When the taproot reaches the bottom, instead of circling around, the opening enables the root to gently 'self-prune' itself, stimulating the growth of feeder roots further up.